Owen and Emmett Ezell were born joined at the abdomen and sharing the same liver and intestines but the conjoined twins now have a better chance at a normal life after they were successfully separated at a hospital in Dallas.
The Medical City Children's Hospital has been the twin's home since birth but hospital officials announced on Monday that Owen and Emmett are set to be released Wednesday after showing steady improvements since their nine-hour surgery in August where doctors conducted a risky procedure of splitting the intestine and a blood vessel in the liver shared by the twins.
The twins will be sent to a rehab facility where they will spend anywhere from several weeks to several months before they can finally go home to be with their older brothers Liam and Ethan. The parents said they were happy and relieved that Owen and Emmett will finally be discharged but admitted they were also anxious of what lies ahead.
"I'll finally have my family together but we are about to face some serious challenges," David Ezell, the twins' father said. "The really frightening life-or-death stuff is behind us but now we worry how about how we are going to pull the rest of it off."
Hospital officials said that the nine-month old boys are no longer fed via IV albeit they continue to be fed in their abdomens using tubes. They're also no longer using breathing machines and now use trachea tubes for receiving nutrients.
The babies though still remain at risk of infection. Doctors have also advised the parents that there are no guarantees for the babies' long term survival. The twins may also have to undergo more corrective surgeries in the future.
Still, Tom Renard, pediatric separation surgeon at the Medical City, said he was encouraged by the progress. He said that the babies are alert and have grown more than twice their size at birth. He also described them as survivors.
Conjoined twins occur in one in 50,000 to 200,000 births. Odds of survival among conjoined twins are low with survival rate ranging from 5 to 25 percent. Although surgical procedures can separate conjoined twins, it is considered a risky procedure that requires extreme precision.
