A baby has just had her parasitic twin removed.
As in the case of a girl who died after similar surgery in the Dominican Republic a year ago, the second twin had developed no body. The head that was removed from Manar had been capable of smiling and blinking but not independent life, doctors said.
The 13-strong surgical team separated Manar’s brain from the conjoined organ in small stages on Saturday, cutting off the blood supply to the extra head while preventing increased blood flow to Manar’s heart, which would have risked cardiac arrest.
This totally freaks me out. That second baby was alive. It had a brain. It could smile.
But it didn’t have a body. Because of that, it died.
We really have no way to sustain that baby’s life. Not in any meaningful way. We might have been able to hook it up to machines, keep it alive. But what purpose would that have served? In a case like this, I understand why the child had to die.
But it’s so unfair…so horrifying that things like this have to happen.