Have you ever seen anything so precious? These little boys never saw each others faces before because they were born conjoined back to back at the base of their spines.
In what is being hailed as little short of a medical miracle, Joshua and Jacob Spates have survived being separated after 13 hours in surgery.
The eight-month-old twins from Memphis, Tennessee, are continuing to recover under the watchful eyes of doctors but they have already overcome what is likely to be the biggest obstacle they will ever face.
The twins were joined at the rear of the pelvis and gastrointestinal tract and had to be separated because of the severity of Jacob’s heart condition.
The boys’ mother, Adrienne Spates, said the babies are doing well since their operation, on August 29.
Jacob remains in intensive care and needs a few more operations, while Joshua is already out of the unit and is being prepared to go home.
The eight-month-old twins from Memphis, Tennessee, are continuing to recover under the watchful eyes of doctors but they have already overcome what is likely to be the biggest obstacle they will ever face.
The twins were joined at the rear of the pelvis and gastrointestinal tract and had to be separated because of the severity of Jacob’s heart condition.
The boys’ mother, Adrienne Spates, said the babies are doing well since their operation, on August 29.
Jacob remains in intensive care and needs a few more operations, while Joshua is already out of the unit and is being prepared to go home.
Dr Max Langham, one of the surgeons at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis, said: ‘Joshua’s doing great, and hopefully he’ll be up and going and have a pretty normal lifespan.
He told TODAY that while Jacob has more serious heart problems ‘our cardiology team has very high hopes his treatment… will be successful’.
‘If they had not been separated, sometime in the next year or two, they probably would have passed,’ Dr Langham said.
Just two dozen conjoined twins have ever been successfully separated anywhere in the world.
The condition is extremely rare, only about one in every 200,000 live births is a set of conjoined twins and about 15 per cent of these are joined in a similar way to Joshua and Jacob.
Fewer than a third of conjoined twins survive more than one day.
Joshua and Jacob are one of only six such cases in Memphis history.
Doctors at the hospital said practice was the key to separating the twins successfully. This had included the anaesthesia team sewing together two Cabbage Patch dolls to practise flipping them without tangling the various lines that would be attached during surgery.
This is great! We’re so happy for the Spates and we hope that both Joshua and Jacob will fully recover and go on to have full lives. They’re sooooooooooo cute.
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