Today's surgery to separate conjoined twins Angelina and Angelica Sabuco is progressing well. The twins have been successfully separated, and are now in different rooms for the first time in their lives. Each girl will be in an operating room in the Ford Family Surgery Center at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital for an estimated two to three hours of reconstructive surgery.
From the hospital's pre-surgery press release, a few more details about the plan for reconstruction and surgical recovery:
[Peter Lorenz, MD,] and his team will rebuild the girls’ chest and abdominal walls. They will implant a thick, custom-made resorbable plate in each girl's chest where the sternum should be, and graft bone pieces removed during the separation onto the plates.
"The plates will dissolve over about a year and a half," Lorenz said. "That gives the grafted bone plenty of time to fuse, so eventually the girls will have normal bones and stable chests."
Afterward, the girls will be in intensive care, where they'll recover for four to five days before being moved to a regular room for another week or so. Then they'll head home to San Jose to start their lives as two ordinary little girls.
For more developments, follow the hashtag #conjoinedtwins on Twitter.
Previously: Conjoined twins’ separation – a complex feat
Photo showing the twins at their pre-surgery “meet the press” event on October 31, courtesy Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital
