The mother of 16-week-old girls joined at the head said she won't consider surgery to separate them unless she is certain it will be successful.
Felicia Simms, a resident of Vernon, B.C., had been warned by doctors during her pregnancy that the fetuses had the odds stacked against them. She refused to abort and gave birth in October to Krista and Tatiana.
Twins are born joined at the head less than once in every two million births. Successful separation is difficult and costly. Three years ago, U.S. doctors separated Egyptian twins joined at the head at a cost of about $4.5-million.
In the case of Krista and Tatiana, their mother said on a television talk show aired yesterday, the girls share blood flow to and from their fused heads.
"They have their separate brains, but it's like a zipper effect. That's what they call it, it's all zippered in together," Ms. Simms told Tyra Banks on her talk show.
Although such terminology raises the prospect of the brains being "unzipped," there is an unusual complication. Only weeks after the twins' birth, doctors discovered what they called a "bridge" of tissue connecting their two brains. This raised the possibility that the girls' brains might be able to transmit signals to each other.
"Because they don't know what the bridge is between their brain stems, they're not sure whether they can ever be separated," Ms. Simms said.
Ms. Simms said she would not consider exploratory surgery to test the feasibility of separating the girls. It's all or nothing, she said firmly.
"I wouldn't let them go into surgery unless they were 100-per-cent sure that they could do it," she told Ms. Banks.
In all other areas, Ms. Simms said, her fast-growing girls are developing just like normal babies.
"They're completely different. Sometimes Krista will sleep and Tatiana will be wide awake and she'll look around. It's quite interesting to see how they interact together. I love my girls very much because they're just, they're little angels to me, they're just very gorgeous angels," she said.
"Doctors tell me that they will probably be able to crawl and walk. As long as they can work together and lift their heads together and move the same, they will be able to walk and crawl."
Ms. Simms and her children were on an episode of the talk show dealing with conjoined twins at different stages of their lives. It featured a pair of teenagers who had been separated at 11 months; each now has a prosthetic leg. Also on the show were six-year-olds who had been born conjoined and not separated. Lupita and Carmen Andrade have two legs, one torso, four arms and two heads between them.
The audience reacted supportively to the guests, with a few tears evident and the questions sympathetic to the difficulty these people face.
Ms. Simms acknowledged that the public had at times responded harshly to her decision to give birth to Krista and Tatiana.
"We do get really nasty letters," she said. "The nastiest one we've gotten so far was somebody telling me that they hope that they die, they're freaks of nature, you shouldn't have ever had them, just nasty things like that."
Ms. Simms said that the response had been much more supportive in her own community. As well, she's developed a thick skin for criticism.
"I don't really pick up on what other people think, it doesn't matter to me what they think. It only matters to me what I think, and I love my girls."
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