As in the case of a girl who died after similar surgery in the Dominican Republic a year ago, the second twin had developed no body. The head that was removed from Manar had been capable of smiling and blinking but not independent life, doctors said.This totally freaks me out. That second baby was alive. It had a brain. It could smile.
The 13-strong surgical team separated Manar's brain from the conjoined organ in small stages on Saturday, cutting off the blood supply to the extra head while preventing increased blood flow to Manar's heart, which would have risked cardiac arrest.
But it didn't have a body. Because of that, it died.
We really have no way to sustain that baby's life. Not in any meaningful way. We might have been able to hook it up to machines, keep it alive. But what purpose would that have served? In a case like this, I understand why the child had to die.
But it's so unfair...so horrifying that things like this have to happen.
1 comment:
I saw that whole thing in the news, too, and it freaked me out for the same reasons, Hea Hea. I wonder, though, if the smiles (probably moreso than blinking, seeing as that's a more involuntary action, I would suppose) were really independent as well, or if the second head merely smiled when the little girl did? I don't know, I'm in no way a person able to decipher anything medical at all, but I think it would make me feel better to think that that was the case, that the second head merely smiled because of reactionary reasons, and not independent ones.
I've looked at that picture over and over (I can't bring myself to look at the "raw footage" to which one news site had a link) and I hate to say it, but it really does freaks me out. I have to stare; it scares me, it worries me, it makes me sick. I feel awful thinking this way, but I really honestly can't help it. It's not the second head, though, that makes me react this way (I feel for it, actually, because there's no way it can be saved and that pisses me off in this helpless feeling sort of way) it's the fact that it can happen, that this, no matter how rare, is a possibility.
To think of the amount of issues to spring from this whole ordeal are overwhelming.
I don't know, I can't kill a bug sometimes without freaking out about it, so I don't know where I'd get the strength to deal with something as monumental as this. Granted, the circumstances aren't the same, of course, and there really was NO WAY the second head could have survived (I HATE that there's really no other thing to call it than the "second head") but I just don't know where you get the strength to deal with a situation like that one.
~Brooke
Post a Comment