Doctors Separate Joined Twins

Surgeons on Wednesday separated conjoined twins Regina and Renata Salinas Fierros, who had been attached from the chest to the pelvis for the first 10 months of their lives.

The girls’ prospects for recovery looked good, doctors said.

Surgeons at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles cut the last thread of muscle and tissue connecting the girls at 6:21 p.m., more than three hours ahead of schedule in what had been expected to be a surgery lasting at least 24 hours. It began about 6 a.m. Wednesday.

Reconstruction surgery on the girls’ chests, organs, pelvises and body walls was expected to continue until shortly after midnight. Doctors said the fact the surgery was going faster than expected meant the girls’ chances of infection were lessened.

The buzz in the operating room intensified when Regina and Renata -- who were born at County-USC Medical Center -- were separated, with doctors and nurses vying for clear camera angles.

“Just watching the kids lie next to each other, two separate people, it’s pretty cool,” said Dr. James E. Stein, the pediatric surgeon leading the operation.

Noting that the twins could now lie flat on their backs, he added: “You just know that life has changed.”

Doctors earlier in the day divided the twins’ fused breastbones, livers and pelvises. They also gave the shared large intestine to Renata; a person can survive without that organ.

They kept track of the girls and the equipment monitoring them by marking them in red or blue. Regina, the smaller, physically weaker twin, was assigned red because of its easy association with the fairy-tale character Little Red Riding Hood.

Their condition, in which the twins are joined at the hip but each has two legs, occurs once in every 2.5 million births, according to Childrens Hospital. Five conjoined-twin operations have been performed at the facility since 1966; in three cases both twins survived.

Stein said the girls’ quality of life would have deteriorated without the surgery. Walking normally would have been difficult, as would the development of separate identities. Doctors hope a successful separation will lead to normal physical, psychological and social development for both girls.

Dr. Henri R. Ford, chief of pediatric surgery at Childrens Hospital, said complications could always arise but that the surgery was going “as impeccably as one could envision.”

Parents Sonia Fierros, 23, and Federico Salinas, 36 -- who are from Mexico but living in San Fernando with their two other children on extended tourist visas -- said Wednesday morning they were hopeful.

After hearing their daughters had been separated, the parents were “absolutely ecstatic,” Ford said.