VANCOUVER — After spending the first seven weeks of their lives in hospital, conjoined twins Krista and Tatiana Hogan flew home to Vernon under escort from a team of medical professionals.
"We're looking forward to celebrating our Christmas and New Year's as a family," the girls' mother, Felicia Simms, said in a written statement.
Videotape and photos released by the BC Women's Hospital and Health Centre showed Ms. Simms and a nurse bundling the girls into a specially designed, kidney-shaped car seat for the journey home.
In the statement, Ms. Simms said her infant daughters, born on Oct. 25, are "growing like crazy" and developing as most full-term babies would at this stage.
The babies were to arrive at their grandmother's house in the Okanagan yesterday afternoon. Louise McKay told The Canadian Press that the twins' large extended family is looking forward to meeting the girls she calls Tatty and Krista Girl.
Conjoined twins are a rare event -- only one in 2.5 million births. Doctors who summed up the girls' condition before their discharge this week told reporters they have discovered a bridge of tissue connecting the two girls' upper brain stems.
They said they don't know yet what kind of information is being passed along this connecting corridor.
The girls are expected to return to hospital in the spring for more tests.
Pediatric neurosurgeon Doug Cochrane said this week it could take months for doctors to determine what kind of information is carried along the brain bridge and what it means for the girls' future.
The new bridge discovery means the twins are more intertwined than originally thought. For example, blood that originates in one girl's brain travels through the other's, and vice versa.
The new findings cast doubt on whether the twins, who are anatomic mirrors of one another, can ever be successfully separated.
