Apr 10, 2001 | Q
The operation succeeded! 88 hours of surgery, and both little girls survived. It remains to be seen how much neurological damage they sustained (some is, I suspect, inevitable).
The tough job was to reroute all the shared blood vessels so that both brains had full blood supply. This is an awesome achievement.
The most likely cause of the neurological damage, though, isn’t the mechanics of the operation, it’s the duration of the operation. Morbidity goes up for every hour that a patient is under anesthesia; maintaining people in an unnatural state like that isn’t consequence-free.
• Posted by: Jason Levine on Apr 10, 2001, 10:28 AM