Return to Transcripts main page

American Morning

Conjoined Twins Separated, Operation Ongoing

Aired August 06, 2002 - 09:01   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: We're following this story in California, amazing story about the conjoined twins. The operation went for many, many hours. We want to get to Gary Tuchman who is standing by in L.A. to bring us up to date on what's happening and what we're hearing.

Gary, good morning, where it's about 6:00 your time there on the West Coast.

GARY TUCHMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Bill, it's a wonderful morning, too, here in Los Angeles. Maria Teresa and Maria De Jesus, one-year- old girls, celebrated their first birthday on July 25th. But two weeks later, they are getting the best possible birthday present. They've been in the operating room for 22 hours. They're still there right now, but they have been separated, conjoined twins who are joined at head. The separation has been successful.

Two little girls from Guatemala. Their parents are here getting some much-needed sleep right now. But everything seems to be going very well. And with us right now is a medical student who was in the operating room for many of the hours.

This is Houman Hemmati.

First of all, Hemmati, tell me why you were in the operating room to begin with if you're a medical student.

HOUMAN HEMMATI, UCLA MED. STUDENT: I originally started doing surgery with Dr. Lazareth (ph) three years ago.

TUCHMAN: He's the chief pediatric surgeon here at the Mattel Children's Hospital.

HEMMATI: Yes. Dr. Lazareth (ph) is one of the premier neurosurgeons in the world actually. And we're fortunate to have him at UCLA. And he asked me to go with him to Guatemala three months ago to help him operate on children down there. And in Guatemala, we actually found out about these twins, the two Marias. We did our best to get them to UCLA. Fortunately, were successful in doing that for the separation surgery.

TUCHMAN: How many hours were you in the operating room?

HEMMATI: I was in the operating 14 or so hours. TUCHMAN: They entered the operating room 8:00 a.m. Pacific Time yesterday morning. When did the separation procedure actually start?

HEMMATI: The separation procedure actually did start at 8:00 a.m. Everything from 8:00 a.m. up until 1:00, which is when the two twins were physically separated from one another is technically the separation.

TUCHMAN: And 1:00 a.m., just so we don't confuse our viewers, is five hours ago here on the West Coast.

HEMMATI: Yes.

TUCHMAN: So all this time they've been working on that.

HEMMATI: Yes.

TUCHMAN: When you were in there, when did you realize it would be successful?

HEMMATI: We all the very strong feeling that it was going to be successful when the surgeons announced that the blood vessels that were the between the two brains of the babies in fact could be separated without too much difficulty. And at that point, they began the painstaking process figuring which blood vessel belonged to which child, confirmed that using various different inter-operative techniques, snipped individual blood vessels,waited 20 minutes or so to see, OK, is this going to work. Once they saw it was going to work, they went ahead and did all the blood vessels, and at that point, we knew the hard part was done.

TUCHMAN: We should explain to our viewers, they had different brains, their arteries were separate, but their veins, which pumps the blood from the brain to the heart, were crisscrossed together, is that correct?

HEMMATI: Exactly. And the Venus structure in the brain actually is really important. If you pump blood through the brain, but can't go in and out the right way, what happens is you build a lot of pressure in the brain, and the brain has only so much room to expand being in the encased skull, so it could explode and cause a lot of damage. So in this case, it was really critical to give exactly enough Venus drainage to each of the children so that they would each able to maintain enough pressure in their brains.

TUCHMAN: Houman, what's the feeling in the operating room when you were there?

HEMMATI: The feeling originally started off extremely optimistic. That's expected. It got a little bit tense when we got to the more critical parts. Once we went over that hurdle. It was, again, extremely optimistic. And by the end, it was miraculous. The second that the two twins were physically separated from one another, everyone had goose bumps, doctors, nurses, students, even some of the cameramen who in there taping it. People started crying, doctors included, cheering, screaming, clapping. You name it. We have every sort of emotion. At the end when that was done, Took about 30 or so seconds, everyone just paused, took a moment to just look at these twins and really appreciate what we had just done. It was really miraculous. It's hard to put that into words.

TUCHMAN: Houman, wonderful hearing from you. Great way to start the morning. Thanks for joining us. Appreciate it.

HEMMATI: My pleasure. Thank you.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com