Al Arabiya meets Saudi Arabian surgeon who separated 42 conjoined twins

[Saif al-Arab]

Al Arabiya meets Saudi surgeon who separated 42 conjoined twins

Dr. Abdullah al-Rabeeah says his legacy will live on as the country carefully looks to pass on the experience to a new generation. (SPA)
​

By Ismaeel Naar
Al Arabiya English Thursday, 26 January 2017

After separating 42 sets of conjoined twins over the years, Saudi pediatric surgeon Dr. Abdullah al-Rabeeah still remembers his first surgery as if it was yesterday.

It was on a set of Saudi twins in December 1990 but he says his first challenging case came exactly two years later.

“The first surgery I conducted to separate twins happened in December 1990 on Saudi twins which was not a complex case but the most challenging first case came two years later in December 1992 which is a set of Sudanese twins which took 18 hours to separate,” he told Al Arabiya English.

But when asked whether he has favorites out of all the twins he has separated over 36 years, Dr. Rabeeah first plays the diplomatic parent but gives in when he remembers the Malaysian Siamese twins Ahmed and Mohammed Rosli Abdulraheem.




In 2002 Dr. Rabeeah received the case directly from the late King Abdullah himself after Malaysian and British surgeons had already tried to separate the twins, but failed.

I don't have favorites, but there are more challenging ones that never leave you. If you look at the Malaysian twins Ahmed and Mohammed who were separated in September 17, 2002, they were the most challenging for me because they were first operated in an attempted-surgery in Malaysia and England and then ended up in our center. That surgery took almost 24 hours, to be exact 23 and-a -half hours which is the longest and most tedious one I've done of all the cases,” he said.

Early years
Being the go-to surgeon to operate on conjoined twins in the Middle East was never easy. It certainly was not the plan when a young Dr. Rabeeah first started his medical training at King Saud University years ago.

Dr. Rabeeah said he was torn between choosing two fields of focus, pediatrics and surgery. His mentor at the time, Dr. Hassan Kamel, told him to combine the two and that decision took him to Canada where he received his Pediatric Surgery Fellowship from the University of Alberta Hospital and became a chief resident at the university in 1985. In 1987, Dr. Rabeeah completed his residency in general and pediatric surgery at Dalhousie University before returning to Saudi Arabia where he would go on to carve out a career that would see him separate 42 twins to date.

“So far, my team and I have conducted 42 surgeries in total. And I remember each set of twins. They are now part of a growing family now,” he told Al Arabiya English.

But for all those surgeries, former conjoined twins from Poland Daria and Olga Kolacz are still remembered fondly by their home country as well as in Saudi Arabia.

Continuing legacy
A video showing Daria and Olga running to embrace Dr. Rabeeah resurfaced online and went viral recently, despite the meeting have taken place several years ago.

He says he will always remember them because of the trust that was placed on him to separate them nearly 10 years ago.

The Kolacz twins were initially heading to the United States and Europe and given a slim chance of survival by many doctors before Dr. Rabeeah said he’d take on their case.

“From my experience, I've allowed cases up to 60 percent risk value but anything more than that will be extremely risky and many surgeons in the world will say that they have to be cautious,” he said.

“But the Polish twins will always stay with me forever. When they came to visit Saudi Arabia the first time for a checkup, I was the health minister at the time and immediately as the door opened, they raced to hug me and I could not stop tearing up from that emotional moment. You can't describe it unless you experience it,” he said

He said that the hug itself was a hallmark of the simplest gratitude a child could give their doctor.

“That could never be forgotten,” he said.

While there are still many years left for Dr. Rabeeah before he contemplates retirement, he says his legacy will live on in Saudi Arabia as it carefully looks to pass on the experience to a new generation.

“We already started a program several years ago, wherein during every separation surgery, we bring in young team of doctors - both men and women - and technicians and nurses to be exposed to the experience. Over the last 25 years we have managed to develop a newer generation who are able to carry on this important legacy in Saudi Arabia,” he said.

“We've seen over the years that the overall trust in Saudi Arabia’s healthcare system is becoming higher. To be honest, this trust in Saudi doctors and nurses is increasing even inside the country. In the last decade, people outside are also trusting us more and more which is a plus for us. We’ve come a long way and we have much more to give,” he added.

Last Update: Friday, 27 January 2017 KSA 14:14 - GMT 11:14

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/fe...es-42-conjoined-twins-remembers-them-all.html

A true hero that we can rightfully be extremely proud of.

 

[Saif al-Arab]

As a side note, he has operated Pakistani conjoined twins as well.

See below:

Conjoined Twins, a Trip to Saudi Arabia and a Risky Operation​

By BEN HUBBARD

APRIL 6, 2016

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — The doctor told the parents to say goodbye. With wet eyes, they held out their palms in prayer and bent over the hospital bed to kiss their daughters’ tiny foreheads.

The girls had spent the year since their birth facing each other like mirror images they could not escape. Identical twins joined at the belly, each had two arms and two legs, individual hearts and digestive tracts, but they shared a liver. Blood pumping through one also flowed through the other.

They could stand with their mother’s help, sometimes posing cheek-to-cheek, other times draping their arms around each other’s neck as if slow dancing. Now, shortly after their first birthday, they had traveled from their poor town in Pakistan to oil-rich Saudi Arabia for a rare and risky separation surgery that would radically change their lives.

“I still have doubts, and I am scared,” said their father, Nisar Ghani, 45, as the doctors wheeled the girls, Fatima and Mishal, toward the operating room. “In the end, it is all up to God.”

The operation, on March 26, was part of a long-running Saudi program to separate conjoined twins who come from poor families around the world. Dr. Abdullah al-Rabeeah, the surgeon who leads the program, said that since 1990 it had performed 40 procedures for families from 20 countries — on three continents — who could not otherwise afford the costly operations. That includes 34 separations like Fatima and Mishal’s; two “sacrifice” operations, as Dr. Rabeeah described them, in which an ailing twin was removed so the other could live; and four that excised extra body parts from individual children.

The program has not widely reported its work in scientific journals; Dr. Rabeeah said 70 of its 74 patients were still alive.

Dr. James O’Neill, a professor of pediatric surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who has also separated large numbers of conjoined twins, said he did not know much about the Saudi program. But after looking into it, Dr. O’Neill said the program appeared to be one of the largest of its type in the world. “On a surface level, it sounds quite valid,” he said.

Success, he noted, should be measured not only by survival rates, but also by the causes of death for patients who did not make it, and the quality of life for those who did.

Dr. Rabeeah said that of the four patients who did not survive, two died from heart disease, one from cholera and one from meningitis. Some of the other former patients keep in touch and occasionally send photographs. Two girls from Sudan whom he separated in 1992, for example, recently visited after graduating from college.

Photo

Nisar Ghani and his wife, Leena, with their daughters Fatima and Mishal in their guesthouse in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. CreditSergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
The program is housed at the King Abdullah Specialist Children’s Hospital in Riyadh, which is run by the Saudi National Guard. It is driven by a mix of royal largess, Islamic charity and shrewd public diplomacy.

King Salman approves individual cases and the government foots the bills, giving patients and their families first-class plane tickets and free accommodations. The operations are heavily promoted by the local news media, and a reporter and a photographer for The New York Times joined Saudi journalists inside the operating theater for the Ghani girls’ surgery.

“It is a unique, rare anomaly that draws the attention of society and of anyone who wants to help, and I have become enormously attached to it,” said Dr. Rabeeah, 61, a grandfatherly Canadian-trained surgeon who has become something of a national hero.

A former health minister who treats members of the Saudi royal family, Dr. Rabeeah has become so associated with conjoined twins that his identical-twin daughters — the youngest of his eight children — once asked their mother, “When did our dad separate us?”

For the Ghani family, from the Swat Valley in Pakistan, the twins’ birth had been a mix of joy and trauma. Mr. Ghani said that he had left school in eighth grade to help his father farm, then came to Saudi Arabia to work, while his wife, Leena, stayed in Pakistan with their first three daughters, now 9, 7 and 4.

The couple were overjoyed when Ms. Ghani became pregnant with twins because they thought it gave them a better chance of having a son, Mr. Ghani said. When the girls were born conjoined, the doctors spirited them away and did not tell their mother, fearing it would shock her. She said she finally coaxed the news out of her 7-year-old daughter three days later.

Mr. Ghani returned from Saudi Arabia to search for a solution to a condition some of his neighbors saw as divine punishment.

“Me and my family were worried that the people around us would not know how to react,” he said.

The family eventually found a hospital in Islamabad, Pakistan, that could care for but not separate the girls, who were becoming harder to manage as they grew. As with any twins, they ate more and soiled twice as many diapers as the couple’s previous babies, but Fatima and Mishal could not be separated when they tried to steal each other’s food.

“Sometimes they fight and sometimes they embrace,” Ms. Ghani said.

Eventually, a Pakistani doctor wrote to Dr. Rabeeah. The family flew to Riyadh early last month.

The trip was a major status upgrade for Mr. Ghani, who for 12 years had earned $530 a month as a driver for a Saudi family. Now he was effectively a guest of the king.

Photo

Physiotherapists working with Fatima, left, and Mishal during a post-operation rehabilitation session in Riyadh.Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times​

On the day of the operation, the couple watched via a big screen in an auditorium on another floor, he tapping out messages to relatives on his phone, she quietly weeping and reading the Quran.

In the operating room, built specifically for conjoined twins, with two sets of medical equipment, a team of 20 doctors, nurses and technicians cleaned the girls and applied anesthesia, then marked their bodies and began to cut. The team soon fell into a rhythm, talking softly over the whir of the machines and the overlapping beeps of the two heart monitors.

The hardest part was splitting the liver, which turned out to be essentially two livers fused into one, making the separation easier, Dr. Rabeeah said. Five doctors clustered over the girls, some holding back the skin while one cut and cauterized, and another stitched up arteries to prevent blood loss.

Upstairs in the auditorium, nurses on break dropped by to watch the operation, as did members of the National Guard in camouflage uniforms and red caps.

In the front row sat Nabil Abdulhaq, a Yemeni school inspector whose son Ahmed had been born two years earlier with two bodies but a single head, heart and set of lungs. Mr. Abdulhaq showed a picture on his phone of the boy lying on a bed with an extra half-torso extending from his chest, with two extra arms and legs.

Now Ahmed, whom Dr. Rabeeah operated on in February, was running around the auditorium, gleefully swiping toys from other children.

Back in the operating room, having divided the liver, the doctors cut through the girls’ abdominal muscles and started on the last strip of skin that connected them.

Smoke rose from the table and the smell of seared flesh filled the air. Then Dr. Rabeeah counted down from five, finally proclaiming, “Zero! Praise God!” as the girls were separated.

The nurses burst into applause.

Then, for the first time in their lives, the girls were placed on separate beds. The team sewed them up, and plastic surgeons gave each one a belly button. Once stabilized, the girls were wheeled into a hallway to meet their parents, a crowd of well-wishers, the Pakistani ambassador and a local television crew that was broadcasting live.

“You can kiss them,” Dr. Rabeeah said.

Mr. Ghani did, then stepped back, bowed down and pressed his forehead to the tile in thanks.

Correction: April 26, 2016
An article on April 7 about a successful operation to separate conjoined Pakistani twins at a hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — part of a Saudi program that helps poor families of such twins around the world — misstated the age of Dr. Abdullah al-Rabeeah, the surgeon who leads the program. He is 61, not 66.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/...ip-to-saudi-arabia-and-a-risky-operation.html

 

[Khafee]

Love this thread. Thanks bro.

 

[shhh]

As a side note, he has operated Pakistani conjoined twins as well.

See below:

Conjoined Twins, a Trip to Saudi Arabia and a Risky Operation​

By BEN HUBBARD

APRIL 6, 2016

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — The doctor told the parents to say goodbye. With wet eyes, they held out their palms in prayer and bent over the hospital bed to kiss their daughters’ tiny foreheads.

The girls had spent the year since their birth facing each other like mirror images they could not escape. Identical twins joined at the belly, each had two arms and two legs, individual hearts and digestive tracts, but they shared a liver. Blood pumping through one also flowed through the other.

They could stand with their mother’s help, sometimes posing cheek-to-cheek, other times draping their arms around each other’s neck as if slow dancing. Now, shortly after their first birthday, they had traveled from their poor town in Pakistan to oil-rich Saudi Arabia for a rare and risky separation surgery that would radically change their lives.

“I still have doubts, and I am scared,” said their father, Nisar Ghani, 45, as the doctors wheeled the girls, Fatima and Mishal, toward the operating room. “In the end, it is all up to God.”

The operation, on March 26, was part of a long-running Saudi program to separate conjoined twins who come from poor families around the world. Dr. Abdullah al-Rabeeah, the surgeon who leads the program, said that since 1990 it had performed 40 procedures for families from 20 countries — on three continents — who could not otherwise afford the costly operations. That includes 34 separations like Fatima and Mishal’s; two “sacrifice” operations, as Dr. Rabeeah described them, in which an ailing twin was removed so the other could live; and four that excised extra body parts from individual children.

The program has not widely reported its work in scientific journals; Dr. Rabeeah said 70 of its 74 patients were still alive.

Dr. James O’Neill, a professor of pediatric surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who has also separated large numbers of conjoined twins, said he did not know much about the Saudi program. But after looking into it, Dr. O’Neill said the program appeared to be one of the largest of its type in the world. “On a surface level, it sounds quite valid,” he said.

Success, he noted, should be measured not only by survival rates, but also by the causes of death for patients who did not make it, and the quality of life for those who did.

Dr. Rabeeah said that of the four patients who did not survive, two died from heart disease, one from cholera and one from meningitis. Some of the other former patients keep in touch and occasionally send photographs. Two girls from Sudan whom he separated in 1992, for example, recently visited after graduating from college.

Photo

Nisar Ghani and his wife, Leena, with their daughters Fatima and Mishal in their guesthouse in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. CreditSergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
The program is housed at the King Abdullah Specialist Children’s Hospital in Riyadh, which is run by the Saudi National Guard. It is driven by a mix of royal largess, Islamic charity and shrewd public diplomacy.

King Salman approves individual cases and the government foots the bills, giving patients and their families first-class plane tickets and free accommodations. The operations are heavily promoted by the local news media, and a reporter and a photographer for The New York Times joined Saudi journalists inside the operating theater for the Ghani girls’ surgery.

“It is a unique, rare anomaly that draws the attention of society and of anyone who wants to help, and I have become enormously attached to it,” said Dr. Rabeeah, 61, a grandfatherly Canadian-trained surgeon who has become something of a national hero.

A former health minister who treats members of the Saudi royal family, Dr. Rabeeah has become so associated with conjoined twins that his identical-twin daughters — the youngest of his eight children — once asked their mother, “When did our dad separate us?”

For the Ghani family, from the Swat Valley in Pakistan, the twins’ birth had been a mix of joy and trauma. Mr. Ghani said that he had left school in eighth grade to help his father farm, then came to Saudi Arabia to work, while his wife, Leena, stayed in Pakistan with their first three daughters, now 9, 7 and 4.

The couple were overjoyed when Ms. Ghani became pregnant with twins because they thought it gave them a better chance of having a son, Mr. Ghani said. When the girls were born conjoined, the doctors spirited them away and did not tell their mother, fearing it would shock her. She said she finally coaxed the news out of her 7-year-old daughter three days later.

Mr. Ghani returned from Saudi Arabia to search for a solution to a condition some of his neighbors saw as divine punishment.

“Me and my family were worried that the people around us would not know how to react,” he said.

The family eventually found a hospital in Islamabad, Pakistan, that could care for but not separate the girls, who were becoming harder to manage as they grew. As with any twins, they ate more and soiled twice as many diapers as the couple’s previous babies, but Fatima and Mishal could not be separated when they tried to steal each other’s food.

“Sometimes they fight and sometimes they embrace,” Ms. Ghani said.

Eventually, a Pakistani doctor wrote to Dr. Rabeeah. The family flew to Riyadh early last month.

The trip was a major status upgrade for Mr. Ghani, who for 12 years had earned $530 a month as a driver for a Saudi family. Now he was effectively a guest of the king.

Photo

Physiotherapists working with Fatima, left, and Mishal during a post-operation rehabilitation session in Riyadh.Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times​

On the day of the operation, the couple watched via a big screen in an auditorium on another floor, he tapping out messages to relatives on his phone, she quietly weeping and reading the Quran.

In the operating room, built specifically for conjoined twins, with two sets of medical equipment, a team of 20 doctors, nurses and technicians cleaned the girls and applied anesthesia, then marked their bodies and began to cut. The team soon fell into a rhythm, talking softly over the whir of the machines and the overlapping beeps of the two heart monitors.

The hardest part was splitting the liver, which turned out to be essentially two livers fused into one, making the separation easier, Dr. Rabeeah said. Five doctors clustered over the girls, some holding back the skin while one cut and cauterized, and another stitched up arteries to prevent blood loss.

Upstairs in the auditorium, nurses on break dropped by to watch the operation, as did members of the National Guard in camouflage uniforms and red caps.

In the front row sat Nabil Abdulhaq, a Yemeni school inspector whose son Ahmed had been born two years earlier with two bodies but a single head, heart and set of lungs. Mr. Abdulhaq showed a picture on his phone of the boy lying on a bed with an extra half-torso extending from his chest, with two extra arms and legs.

Now Ahmed, whom Dr. Rabeeah operated on in February, was running around the auditorium, gleefully swiping toys from other children.

Back in the operating room, having divided the liver, the doctors cut through the girls’ abdominal muscles and started on the last strip of skin that connected them.

Smoke rose from the table and the smell of seared flesh filled the air. Then Dr. Rabeeah counted down from five, finally proclaiming, “Zero! Praise God!” as the girls were separated.

The nurses burst into applause.

Then, for the first time in their lives, the girls were placed on separate beds. The team sewed them up, and plastic surgeons gave each one a belly button. Once stabilized, the girls were wheeled into a hallway to meet their parents, a crowd of well-wishers, the Pakistani ambassador and a local television crew that was broadcasting live.

“You can kiss them,” Dr. Rabeeah said.

Mr. Ghani did, then stepped back, bowed down and pressed his forehead to the tile in thanks.

Correction: April 26, 2016
An article on April 7 about a successful operation to separate conjoined Pakistani twins at a hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — part of a Saudi program that helps poor families of such twins around the world — misstated the age of Dr. Abdullah al-Rabeeah, the surgeon who leads the program. He is 61, not 66.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/...ip-to-saudi-arabia-and-a-risky-operation.html

I enjoyed reading it so much!.

What a beautiful story, an awesome share indeed!

 

[Saif al-Arab]

I enjoyed reading it so much!.

What a beautiful story, an awesome share indeed!

It really is. You can only have respect left for such people. Talk about a life-changing operation for those kids.

Love this thread. Thanks bro.

My pleasure.

 

[shhh]

It really is. You can only have respect left for such people. Talk about a life-changing operation for those kids.

Exactly!.

And those are cute girls.

 

[Ahmad Bhutta]

I hope.and. pray more.we.Muslims. produce.more.and.more.Dr's and scientists so we don't have to send our people to.West for special treatments

 

[Saif al-Arab]

Saga of sacrifice
Touching story of a Saudi Arabian child donating bone marrow to his brother




Ziyad suffers from an acute form of leukemia and has undergone previously chemotherapy treatment in Saudi Arabia, but with no success.— Courtesy photos

His brother:



By Meriem Al Jaber

A SAUDI boy named Ahmad Rakan Al-Shammari was offered the Medal of Courage by the Mayo Clinic in the United States for his humane and magnanimous conduct toward his brother to whom he donated bone marrow. One of the boy’s most oft-quoted phrases was : “If my brother needs anything else while I’m under anesthesia please take it.”

Al Arabiya contacted his father Rakan Al-Shammari who is currently with both of his children in the United States. As conveyed by the father, Ahmad’s little brother namely Ziyad suffers from an acute form of leukemia and has undergone previously chemotherapy treatment in Saudi Arabia, but with no success.

Ziyad was transferred to the Mayo Clinic in the United States where all of Al-Shammari family members were tested for a bone marrow potential donor.

Ahmed was the perfect match for Ziyad. Ahmad’s mother was reluctant at first as she was afraid of the consequences of such an operation, but Ahmad’s resilience and insistence to donate his bone marrow to his little brother convinced both parents.

Prior to the operation, the young boy was questioned by the doctors in charge. The doctors assured Ahmad that he was in no way obliged to proceed with the operation or to donate bone marrow, but the young boy’s answers fully convinced the medical team.

The operation was carried out last Thursday.

In the operating room, the medical team operated along a translator and when they demanded of the boy if he wanted anything before being anesthetized his response was: “Yes, if my brother needs anything else while I am still under anesthesia, please take it and do not return it to me”.

While the translator was conveying Ahmad’s wishes, the medical team was touched by the boy’s words. Afterwards, some team members couldn’t hold their composure and had even to leave the operating room.

The father further added that the operation succeeded by the grace of God and considered it a good omen that it coincided with the date of the Saudi National Holiday. He also confirmed that Ahmad’s health was good and that the boy already left the hospital while Ziyad was still in intensive care.

Furthermore, he stated that the treatment plan needed 100 days to reap any concrete form of success and continued by saying that: “We will stay in America for 3 months to be reassured of Ziyad’s health.”

In addition, Al-Shammari explains that he works in the Ministry of Health in Hafar Al-Batin and took a leave of one year from work, which ends in the month of Rabee Al-Awwal, to foresee his child’s condition.

The father has four children, one of whom he barely saw since she was born. In fact, his daughter Jawhara is about one year old now.

Moreover, he explained that in the past 9 months upon learning of Ziyad’s leukemia, Al-Shammari’s wife was also pregnant at that time, and was about to give birth. Yet by turn of fate, while Ziyad was brought to Dammam to undergo treatment in a specialized hospital, his mother gave birth to the little girl in the King Fahad Specialist Hospital. The two facilities where both mother and child stayed were adjacent and only separated by a wall. A few days later, other Al-Shammari family members were entrusted with the newborn child “Jawhara”.

The parents have not seen her since then as they have been taking care of Ziyad for 11 months traveling with him to the United States when the chemotherapy treatment failed. — Al Arabiya English

http://saudigazette.com.sa/article/518311/SAUDI-ARABIA/Saudi-child

 

[Saif al-Arab]

Saudi crown prince facilitates treatment of Palestinian conjoined twins in Riyadh
ARAB NEWS | Published — Friday 27 October 2017

Palestinian conjoined twins lie in an incubator at the nursery on October 22, 2017 at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. (AFP / MAHMUD HAMS)

JEDDAH: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has directed health authorities to transfer Palestinian Siamese twins Haneen and Farah from Gaza to King Abdul Aziz Medical City of the National Guard in Riyadh for treatment and the possibility of separating them.
Abdullah Al-Rabeeah, supervisor general of King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center (KSRelief), said that this humanitarian gesture from the crown prince comes as an extension of the great humanitarian efforts being undertaken by the Kingdom, and stresses the desire of King Salman to stand with the Palestinian people.
He pointed out that the twins, who are joined in the abdominal and pelvic region, have one lower limb and share some internal organs. He added that they need accurate medical tests to ascertain the joint organs and the possibility of separating them.
The twins were born in Gaza on Sunday.

http://www.arabnews.com/node/1183821/saudi-arabia

@Falcon29

 

[Saif al-Arab]

Conjoined Sudanese twins to be seperated on Sunday in Riyadh

The surgery is imperative to the twins survaval as they suffer from congenital and respitaory problems. (SPA)

Staff writer, Al Arabiya English
Friday, 3 November 2017

The King Abdullah Specialist Pediatric Hospital at King Abdulaziz Medical City in Riyadh will conduct a surgery to separate two Sudanese twins on Sunday.

The operation, which will be conducted on the directives of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, will separate the 13-month-old conjoined female twins Joud and Junna who are connected through the chest and abdomen areas.

According to Dr Abdullah al-Rabeeah, Advisor to the Royal Court General Supervisor of the King Salman Center for Relief and Humanitarian Works, and head of the surgical team, the twins share a liver and heart valve.

“They suffer from breathing difficulties with a partial failure of the lungs and frequent chest infections and have congenital defects in the pulmonary veins. The expected success rate of the surgery 60 percent, God willing,” he said.


Last Update: Friday, 3 November 2017 KSA 16:12 - GMT 13:12

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/Ne...wins-to-be-seperated-on-Sunday-in-Riyadh.html

Insha'Allah the upcoming operation will succeed with both the Palestinian and Sudanese case.

KSA being one of the few leading countries in the world on this field is a reason for being proud.

 

[Saif al-Arab]

SAUDI ARABIA
Palestinian conjoined twins separation surgery successful
ARAB NEWS | Published — Sunday 7 January 2018

The separation surgery of Palestinian conjoined twins Farah and Haneen has been successful at King Abdullah Specialized Children Hospital in Riyadh. (AFP)

RIYADH: The separation surgery of Palestinian conjoined twins Farah and Haneen has been successful, announced Dr. Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al-Rabiah, adviser at the Royal Court and General Supervisor of King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center (KSrelief) who is head of the medical and surgical team for the separation surgery.
Dr. Al-Rabiah affirmed that the situation of the twin is very stable and the separation surgery is going well in its sixth phase, which is the separation of the urinary system and the separation of the wall of hip, which takes 3 hours.
Dr. Al-Rabiah said that Farah, who was pronounced dead at 12pm, is a parasitic twin and doesn’t have necessary organs to live because she doesn’t have heart, lungs, and brain.
“The surgery is going on as planned successfully, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will record it as the 45th successful twin separation surgery,” Dr. Al-Rabiah said, adding that Saudi Arabia, under the leadership of King Salman and the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who always lead by example when it comes to humanitarian action.
Dr. Mohammed Al-Namshan, Pediatric Surgery Consultant and a member of the surgical team said that the surgery started at 8 a.m., and the various stages would take up to 15 hours to complete.
Dr. Al Namshan added that Farah doesn’t have necessary organs to live, as she doesn’t have a normal heart, lungs, and trachea and also has cerebral atrophy, therefore she will be treated as a parasitic twin.
The surgery was held at King Abdullah Specialized Children Hospital in Riyadh.

http://www.arabnews.com/node/1220936/saudi-arabia

SAUDI ARABIA
Palestinian baby Haneen 'stable' after separation surgery in Saudi Arabia
ARAB NEWS | Published — Friday 12 January 2018

Haneen lies on a bed after she was separated from her sister Farah, at King Abdullah Specialist Children hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia January 9, 2018. (REUTERS)

RIYADH: The condition of the Palestinian girl Haneen, who underwent successful separation surgery from her twin four days ago, is now stable.
The surgery was conducted following the directives of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman last Sunday at the King Abdullah Specialized Children Hospital in Riyadh.
Dr. Abdullah Al-Rabeeah, adviser at the Royal Court and general supervisor of the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center (KSrelief), who was head of the medical and surgical team for the separation surgery said that all medical indicators were stable and the girl had started to breathe well on her own, meaning she no longer needed the assistance of a ventilator.
“Haneen has begun to react normally, and there are no negative indicators. Haneen is expected to stay in the children’s intensive care unit for several days until her health stabilizes and then be transferred to the children’s ward for medical rehabilitation,” Al-Rabeeah said.

http://www.arabnews.com/node/1223771/saudi-arabia

Few things makes me happier than seeing suffering children who have an entire life ahead of them make a recovery. KSA can be proud of a lot of things but this kind of work and assistance to patents from all across the world entirely for free moreover is personally something that I value highly.

@Falcon29

 

[Saif al-Arab]

https://twitter.com/x/status/951078862393413633

@Falcon29