Egyptian doctors remove baby's second head

[bin.dare]

Last updated: 20-02-05, 00:05

Egyptian doctors said they removed a second head from a 10-month-old girl suffering from one of the rarest birth defects in an operation Saturday.

Abla el-Alfy, a consultant in paediatric intensive care, told Reuters at the hospital in Benha, near Cairo, that Manar Maged was in a serious but improving condition after the procedure to treat her for craniopagus parasiticus -- a problem related to that of conjoined twins linked at the skull. "We are still working on the baby. After surgery ... you get unstable blood pressure, you get fever. But she is stabilizing," Alfy said. "We have some improvement."

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.
Video footage provided by the hospital, a national center in Egypt for children's medicine, showed Manar smiling and at ease in a cot with the dark-haired "parasitic" twin, attached at the upper left side of the girl's skull, occasionally blinking.
After the 13-hour operation, Reuters journalists saw the baby, her head swathed in bandages and body wreathed by tubes, in an intensive care ward. A separate twin sister, Noora, is healthy after initial problems with the birth on March 30.

(more)
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/breaking/2005/0220/breaking2.htm

[ogradda]

1. so it was just a head?

a head attached to the girls head??

[benburch]

2. It was a partial twin with a vestigial body.

Joined at the back of the head to the fully formed child.

It could blink and smile.

This raises a huge ethical issue for me, but likely the answer is that neither would have survived for long without this intervention...

[Warpy]

6. Right, the ethical problem comes when brain death is

how we decide that total physical death has occurred.

"No independent life" in this context means only "no body to control."

Would the bodyless head have developed intelligence? A social smile indicated that higher brain functions were present.

However, since the second head threatened the whole child's health and life, the choice was between one death or two.

It's kind of like abortion. Legal abortion results in fetal death. Illegal abortion too often resulted in the death of both.

[Guaranteed]

19. This really does go back to the abortion argument, though.

Whether this "head" had its own brain or not, whether it was a person or not, if we feel that we can legitimately say that the body "belonged" to the other head, the attached head is a parasite, and, if the baby had been of age, she would have had the right to make the decision to detach it. Since she's so young, her parents were in the position of having to make that decision for her. But, in any case, just like in abortion, she had the right to detach it from her body, person or not.

It's really sad, though.

[bin.dare]

4. a second head yes, but receiving blood from one heart ...

...
Alfy said the 13-strong surgical team separated Manar's brain from the conjoined organ in small stages, cutting off the blood supply to the extra head while preventing increased blood flow to Manar's heart, which would have risked cardiac arrest.

[Tsiyu]

13. Here's a photo - WARNING: VERY DISTURBING

This was on a thread in GD...I'll be right back with the link.


Edit: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3144868

[Up2Late]

14. Is that THE child in question? Or is that a different one?

That pretty awful. I does look like the Parasitic twin would have a fully formed brain, but if it's depending on the main child for blood flow, it WILL eventually die and probable kill the Main child too.:cry:

[ogradda]

17. that is utterly awful.

i don't know who to feel sorrier for the mother or that little girl. what a horrible dilemma.

[LisaL]

21. Isn't that something? I hope little girl is doing o'key after her surgery.

[LinuxInsurgent]

28. that's scary...

and it blinked too....poor thing.

[Up2Late]

3. I wonder if the Fundies would call it Murder?

Sounds creepy to me, I've never heard of one that seamed conscious.

[mitchtv]

10. Urban Myth? that nuns have places where they care for

all sorts of hideously deformed children. Thats what I heard when I was a Catholic.

[kodi]

20. of course, did not that second head have its own soul?

anyone who has read "a canticle for leibowitz" knows this.

[mermaid]

5. GROSS!!!!

I'm sorry, man, but that is just plain GROSS!!!

EWWWWWWWWWWW...a head with no body???



Man, I'm sorry, I may be insensitive, but that is just puke-inducing!!

[bin.dare]

7. maybe so, but it is REAL ...

... and therefore must be dealt with. How do you suggest we proceed?

[mermaid]

8. Well, I Would Say

that the way the doctors are going is the correct approach. It's not likely that one could have a decent life that way, and probably jeopardizes their health, too....meanwhile, the head is not, in and of itself, a life, is it? I mean, it could not survive independently, could it?

So it's not murder to kill it. You are doing so to improve the health and quality of life of the individual who actually DOES stand a chance of living...so where's the moral problem?

But, again...the idea is just GROSS!!!

[CaliforniaPeggy]

11. It must be dealt with, indeed

Not all circumstances that come up with newborns are happy ones. Rarely are conjoined twins like this pair. But still the situation has to be dealt with. The parasitic underdeveloped twin has no chance of independent life, and if left attached to the viable twin, will kill it also. So you do what must be done. And you must keep in mind the quality (NOT quantity) of life for the viable twin. Too often we don't consider the quality of life. To me, that is paramount. I speak as a nurse, BTW.

[mitchtv]

9. not as gross as Ray Millans's head

grafted onto Rosie Greier in " the man with two heads"

[KittyWampus]

12. Smiling & Blinking Aren't Necessarily Evidence Of Consiousness.

just really basic muscular functions.

But the idea of the head independantly reacting to stimulus is too freaking weird.

[Guaranteed]

16. It sounds like it was a person- they refer to it as a "head" in the

article, probably just to soften the blow of this for the reader.

While I understand the surgery, I don't think that we should trivialize it if that "head" had its own brain.

[LisaL]

22. I think they refer to it as a head because it has no body.

[TroglodyteScholar]

26. sorry, but L O L (eom)

[ogradda]

29. did it have a name?

did they feed it? talk to it?

[Guaranteed]

15. That is freaking HEAVY. nt

[Blue to the bone]

18. It appears another child was born at the same time!!!!

3 heads, 2 bodies.

I always wonder how things like this must have disturbed human beings hundreds of years ago. Of course, I suspect that for many, the mother died in child birth.

[cornermouse]

24. Heavy in more ways than one.

Imagine trying to lift two heads + the slight "body" off the pillow in the morning. Imagine trying to crawl, learn to walk, with that extra weight.

I feel sorry for the mother and child. The extra head had to go.

[jbnow]

23. At 10 months

babies have a lot of words, besides smiles and squeals. I hope so much for the parents that this was not true for "the head"...that the eyes weren't alert and vibrant. I hope it was more just reflexes.

There wasn't another choice for any normal life for the girl(s), I wish them the best.

If "the head" had a soul, she is free.

[LizW]

25. Amazing

I had no idea a child with that sort of defet could survive. It's incredible.

Reminds me of a program I saw on tv a while ago about conjoined sisters who had basically one body between them. The upper body from about the ribcage up was wide and, I think there were two hearts and two sets of lungs. But there were only two arms and two legs. The little girls were about nine years old, and the program showed them swimming and playing sports. It brought up all sorts of issues like, should they have one number on their uniform, or two? While they played a single position in the outfield, should they get to bat once or twice? Their minds made them completely separate people, but for the purposes of sports, there was only one body.

They were adorable, and they said the question they were asked a lot by other children was, "Do you cheat in school?" They both giggled and said, "Sometimes."

[benburch]

27. Those two are amazing.

They tell people; "We are a girl with two heads! We are two girls with one body!"