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Ahmed & Mohamed Ibrahim were separated Sunday, October 12, 2003 in a 33 hour marathon surgery. The actual physical separation occurred 26 hours into the surgery at 11: 17 am CST, however an additional 7 hours was needed to close the wounds. Ahmed & Mohamed Ibrahim were born in a small town 500 miles south of Cairo on June 2, 2001. They are identical twin boys, conjoined at the skull. They are normal little boys in every other way, but just happened to be born fused at the top of their skulls.
Their extremely rare condition, known as craniopagus twinning, happens in only 2 % of conjoined twins' births or roughly one in 10, 000, 000 live births. The way in which they are conjoined at the top of the head has meant laying on their backs since birth. From birth through six months of age the twins were cared for at the University of Cairo Hospital under the leadership of Dr. Nasser Abdel-Al and a team of dedicated pediatric physicians. Soon after their birth, doctors in Egypt contacted renowned craniofacial surgeon Dr.
Kenneth Salyer in Dallas, TX about the possibility of having the twins evaluated for surgical separation. Plans were made for the twins to come to Medical City Dallas Hospital for a battery of tests to be performed and for examination by Dr. Salyer's team of surgeons. Finally, after several months of waiting the twins arrived in Dallas on June 22 nd, 2002. A team of three pediatric physicians and two nurses accompanied the boys on their long trip from Egypt to Dallas. While in Dallas the twins have had a myriad of medical tests to help the craniofacial and neurological surgeons in the evaluation of their surgical separation.
Many of these tests have been based on medical imaging studies like computed tomography (CT) scans and magnetic resonance imaging studies (MRI). These tests have confirmed that the twins have largely separate brains and share only about 10 % of their brain tissue. MRI and CT studies have also revealed that many of the vascular structures are dependent and are inter-twined in a very complex maze of vessels. The twins inter-dependence of drainage vessels poses a unique challenge to surgeons because of the need for truly independent systems after separation. On April 28 th, 2003 the International Craniofacial Institute's surgery team placed tissue expanders under the twins's kin. After an estimated 3 - 5 months of skin expansion the twins were be ready for separation surgery.
A truly multidisciplinary team of experts headed by Dr. Kenneth Salyer have been assembled to care for the twins. Go to the mirror and take a long, hard look at that body of yours. Gone are the days when you thought it was a matter of "the head bone is connected to the neck bone, the neck-bone's connected to the shoulder bone... "; now you have to deal with enzymes and stem cells and DNA and God knows what else. Our body is an organism that seems to grow more complex every day, as yet another scientist makes yet another ground-breaking discovery that leaves us more puzzled than before. Scientific and medical progress has not only turned the human body into a mind-blowing physical entity, it has also transformed it into a moral template.
A thousand ethical issues are couched in its sinews, a hundred dilemmas nestle in its folds. Witness the case of the Manchester Siamese twins. If the month-old Jodie and Mary are not separated, both will die within six months. If they are separated, Jodie will almost certainly live (although handicapped), but Mary will die. The girls' Catholic parents don't want to separate them: "that is not God's will", they say.
Their Church, as Archbishop Cormac Murphy-O'Connor confirmed, upholds their stand. Their Church is mine -- yet its teaching strikes me not only as cruel, but also confusing: morality is about intention, not just consequence. If the intention behind the separation is to save a child's life, rather than to kill her sister, then isn't it morally justified? For instance, the Church may forbid a pregnant mother to abort even if her life is threatened by childbirth; and yet it allows a pregnant cancer sufferer to have chemotherapy to save her own life, even though the treatment may kill the foetus.
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Research essay sample on Ahmed Mohamed Ibrahim Mohamed Ibrahim Twins
