First phase of surgery on Baby Lakshmi successful

MAY GOD BLESS YOU: Doctors say the baby is stable with no complications so far.

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Bangalore: Surgeons at Bangalore's Sparsh Hospitals have successfully separated the spine of two-year-old Laksmi from her parasitic twin in the first stage of a long and complicated operation.

The team of 36 doctors, who are carried out the operation, claimed they have completed the 'most critical' part of the operation by separating the spinal cord that extended into Lakshmi's headless twin.

The doctors are now set to separate the parasitic lower part of Lakshmi's body. The long surgery, which had begun on Tuesday morning, went off without any complication, hospital director and orthopaedic surgeon Sharan Patil — who led the team — said. He described the condition of the baby as stable.

"Paediatric surgeons are now on with their job to separate the organs. Later, the orthopaedic surgeons will try to reconstruct the pelvic ring in the first stage of the operation," Patil said.

Lakshmi, an ischiopagus twin, had two bodies joined at her pelvis. Only one of the twins had a head, while the other was a parasite. Two pairs of legs and arms were formed at either end of the two adjoining torsos, thus appearing as a child with eight limbs.

She was born into a poor family in a village in Araria district near the Bihar-Nepal border. The specialists at Sparsh Hospitals had brought the baby from a poor household in the remote Rampur village on Bihar-Nepal border.

Lakshmi had one kidney in her body and the other in the body of the twin. The spinal cord ran through the other torso and had two excretory passages.

"The greatest challenge before us is to remove the extraneous parts and move all the structures up into Lakshmi without causing any harm to her vital organs," Dr Patil said.

"First when we saw her, we were really scared. She was born during Diwali, so everyone in the village said our child was Goddess Lakshmi incarnate because she had eight limbs. Everyone started worshipping her. We also worshipped her," says Lakshmi's father, Shambhu.

The baby's mother Poonam, who married Shambu six years ago, had given birth to Lakshmi, her second child, in her mother's home without any medical supervision. She did not receive any antenatal care too.