Agence France Presse

Singapore, May 22:

The 15-month-old Indonesian twin girls born conjoined at the hip and abdomen were “doing

very well” after they were surgically separated, doctors said today. “Both woke up this morning and were smiling at their parents and the doctors,” Singaporean consultant surgeon Tan Kai Chah said. The twins, who shared three legs and one anus and had their intestines fused, were successfully separated in a 10-hour operation by a team of 15 doctors at the Gleneagles Hospital yesterday. Tan said Anggi, one of the twins, had been taken off the ventilator Sunday and was breathing on her own. Her sister Anjeli, who is the weaker and smaller of the pair and has a hole in her heart, will remain on the ventilator for another day, Tan said. Each of the twins now have one leg, with the muscle and skin from the middle leg they had shared grafted to cover the abdomen. They are expected to remain in the hospital for two to three weeks, doctors said. British consultant surgeon Edward Kiely, one of the doctors involved in the surgery, said following the operation that there was a “less than five percent chance that complications will occur”.

Doctors said the fact that the twins had separate vaginas, urethras, uteruses, ovaries, bladders and kidneys enabled surgeons to proceed with the operation smoothly. The girls, born into poverty in the Indonesian city of Medan, were brought to Singapore in February and have undergone an intensive evaluation of their condition before the decision was made to separate them. “I’m so relieved. I’m so happy. It’s a miracle,” the twins’ mother, Meng Harmaini, was quoted as saying in the Sunday Times.