Earlier this month, conjoined twins Owen and Emmett Ezell were finally released from the Medical City Children's Hospital in Dallas, where they underwent an operation that separated them. With the apparent success of their operation, the twins now have a better chance at leading normal lives compared to when they remained sharing the same intestines and liver.
A couple in Pennsylvania may have given the same chance to their newborn conjoined twins but decided not to. Michelle Van Horne and Kody Stancombe said that the risks associated with the surgery that would separate their twins Garrett and Andrew Stancombe could cost them their lives.
The twins, who were joined at the torso, share a heart and liver which makes it very risky to separate them. The likelihood of a successful operation to separate conjoined twins varies depending on the type of connection. Twins who are joined at the sacrum, for instance, have nearly 70 percent odds of a successful operation but the chances of successfully separating twins who share the same heart are low.
Michelle Van said she did not expect that the twins will survive pregnancy as she and her husband were already told that she will likely have a stillbirth. The doctors even told them that should the boys make it alive, they may not make it past a few hours after their birth so it was a miracle that twins were born healthy on April 10 and were even cleared to go home just four days after they were born.
Although the twins are generally well, their parents admitted their future remains uncertain as survival rate of conjoined twins are low.
"They could be with us here tomorrow and gone the next second. A month down they could be gone. They could turn into teenagers," said Van Horne. "We don't know and that's the difficulty."
Still Michelle and Kody said that they are grateful that they have the little boys saying they see them as miracle babies as they do everything normal infants do. "They'll continue to fight until it's their time. We will love them and cherish them until that moment and continue even after," said Van Horn.
