Hospital takes on rare surgery to help baby born with 4 legs
CHICAGO — Advocate Children’s Hospital surgeons have successfully operated on a baby from Africa who was born with two spines and an extra set of legs protruding from her neck.
The hospital announced Tuesday that 10-monthold Dominique from Ivory Coast in West Africa, is recovering well from the March 8 surgery.
The baby has already started sitting up again, said Nancy Swabb, who is hosting the infant in her Edgebrook neighborhood home during the infant’s recovery in the U.S.
Doctors expect she’ll be able to live a normal, fully functional life.
“Her recovery has been amazing,” Swabb said. “Children are so resilient.”
Not many hospitals have done such operations, and the surgery was the first of its kind ever performed by Advocate Children’s Hospital.
In the Chicago area, many people think of Lurie Children’s Hospital in downtown Chicago as the go-to facility for complex pediatric operations. Lurie, for example, has successfully separated three sets of conjoined twins.
Lurie also attracts many patients from abroad. Last year, Lurie cared for 247 patients from outside the U.S.
Advocate Children’s Hospital, 15 miles northwest of downtown, admittedly doesn’t attract many patients from abroad and may not be as well-known for complex surgeries, said Dr. Robert Kellogg, one of five surgeons who operated on Dominique.
But he said surgeons at Advocate knew they could help Dominique, whose last name was not being released.
Dominique was born with what’s known as a parasitic twin, Kellogg said. The other twin, however, never fully developed. Only the lower half of that twin’s body formed, and Dominique was born with that parasitic twin joined to her spine, Kellogg said.
Only a handful of cases like Dominique’s, involving a parasitic twin attached at the spine, have ever been documented.
The surgery lasted about six hours. The surgeons had to separate bone, blood vessels and nerves.
“While it’s not something that this hospital has done before, we certainly had the confidence we could plan and perform this surgery and have a good outcome at the end,” Kellogg said.