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evening sitdown
Your evening longread: An incredible mission to separate conjoined twins
It’s a coronavirus-free zone as we bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
It is an incredibly rare condition – conjoined twins. This story is about when a British hospital separated the sisters Safa and Marwa.
(BBC, approx 24 mins reading time)
But this is no routine operation. The shrouded shape of two small girls is picked out by the bright theatre lights. Safa and Marwa are joined at the head. Their brains are exposed as the surgeons work to separate a labyrinth of shared blood vessels. But then the calm and peace of the theatre disappears, as anaesthetists raise the alarm. The blood from Safa’s brain isn’t draining properly and she is shunting blood to her sister. This puts strain on Marwa’s heart and she becomes dangerously unstable. The anaesthetists call out commands, report vital signs and busy themselves trying to stabilise the girls.
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