Shanghai Daily News

The surviving sister of the conjoined twins separated in September at a local hospital is in stable condition and will be discharged within one week. The other sister died three weeks after their surgery due to a congenital heart ailment.

The girl originally left the hospital on Monday morning. She returned in the afternoon with an inflammation on her arm due to needle punctures.

Doctors at Shanghai Children's Medical Center said yesterday the girl was coming along. She will likely undergo another operation on her thorax at the age of two or three.

"We used metal to repair her thorax during separation. Since metal won't grow as she gets older, we will use her own bone to help grow her own tissue at that time," said Chen Qimin, deputy director of Shanghai Children's pediatric surgery department.

The twins, from a rural family in Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, were born on June 6 and were transferred to the hospital on the same day.

They were connected from under their necks to their navel. Their chest bones were connected and they shared a liver and one heart sac. They each had their own heart.

The surgery to separate them was conducted on September 8, two days earlier than scheduled as now-dead twin caught pneumonia and her heart, lungs and kidney were in poor function.

Doctors separated them and launched a primary surgery on the ailing twin's heart at the same time.

The other sister was recovering well while the sick twin was always in critical condition.

"We had planned to do another surgery on her heart disease, but she was too weak to survive such a complicated approach. Though we have tried many methods, she died in early October," Chen said.

With concern for the family's financial difficulty, the hospital provided the treatment free of charge. "The overall expenditure was about 200,000 yuan (US$24,096)," said Ji Qingying, a hospital spokeswoman.

According to doctors, nearly 45 cases of Siamese twins are reported in the world each year.

Only about a third are eligible for separation surgery, a risky operation that still kills many of its patients.

The city has performed four such surgeries before with no survivors, doctors said.