Conjoined twins ready for separation surgery: doctor

IF ALL goes well, conjoined Bhutanese twins Nima and Dawa will be out of hospital in time for Christmas following delicate separation surgery.

After two delays, the 15month-old girls are scheduled for the six-hour procedure tomorrow at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital.

“We feel reasonably confident we will be undertaking the procedure this Friday,” head of paediatric surgery Joe Crameri said yesterday. “Because they are getting stronger they are bickering a little bit more. Dawa, who is always on the bottom, is trying to find a way from not being on the bottom all the time.”

There is a very low chance of the surgery being cancelled as the girls (above) are “very strong”, Dr Crameri said.

“We want complete separ- ation with two girls that are then totally independent,” he said.

On previous occasions, lastminute checks showed the pair were not “quite to the level we’d anticipated”.

The twins, who were brought to Australia with their mother in October, are joined at the torso and share a liver.

The girls’ mum was “obviously disappointed” when previous surgery plans were cancelled.

“She was very stoical about that and kept smiling,” Dr Crameri said.