Betul, Madhya Pradesh:
There's an air of anxiety and cheer in a small hospital in Madhya Pradesh's Betul district. Tomorrow, 11-month-old conjoined twins Aradhana and Stuti who have been living in the Padhar hospital since birth will be separated, in an operation performed by 23 doctors and 11 nurses from India and Australia. This procedure could last up to 10 hours. This made possible after NDTV viewers and ndtv.com users donated more than Rs 10 lakhs for them.
Doctors say, the surgery to separate them involves separating the girls' livers which are fused together and also their hearts covered inside a common membrane. "We have a fantastic team for that. It is a complex operation entailing separating the heart and splitting the liver," explains Rajiv Chaudhury of the Padhar Hospital.
Just a day before they are separated, their mother says she's waiting to take them home.
"I will be in the hospital for the next four days, I am happy that doctors from faraway places have come to operate on them, but I am still tense," their mother Maya Yadav told NDTV.
Ironically, Aradhana and Stuti were abandoned and left in the hospital after they were born. Born into a poor family in Betul in Madhya Pradesh, their father, a farmer with barely two acres of land and their mother, said they were unable to figure out how to treat their twin daughters, who were joined at the chest. Since then, the girls have been looked after by the hospital nurses, doctors and staff.
Doctors will have to wait a week before declaring the separation successful and there maybe years of plastic surgery to normalize the wounds. But for now, a crucial beginning will be made tomorrow.