A pair of conjoined twins born and separated last summer are headed out of the hospital for the first time in their lives
Owen and Emmett Ezell, born at the Medical City Children’s Hospital in Dallas last July, were conjoined at the stomach and separated during a nine-hour surgery, reports Huffington Post . The twins shared a liver and intestines and had a small patch on their lower stomach that wasn't covered by skin or muscles. Surgeons separated the organs, and said the hardest part was dividing a shared blood vessel in the liver. The twins have improved remarkably since their surgery. Thew can now breathe without the help of a breathing machines and no longer need to be fed through an IV.
Conjoined twins are very rare, only occurring in about one in 50,000 to one in 200,000 live births. The survival rate for conjoined twins are typically around 40 to 50 percent.
“I’ll finally have my family together but we are about to face some serious challenges,” says father David Ezell. “The really frightening life-or-death stuff is behind us but now we worry how about how we are going to pull the rest of it off.” The twins are now being moved to a rehab facility, where the parents will learn how to care for their new babies, reports ABC News .