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 The tissue expansion for Knatalye Hope Mata and Adeline Faith Mata
is expected to take six to eight weeks. The girls are joined at the
abdomen and share a liver, diaphragm, pelvis, intestines and the
lining of the heart.
"When I think about December I get that sick feeling in my stomach.
I want to know how much pain they are going to feel after. What is
it going to be like for them?" said their mother, Elysse Mata.
"They are where they should be developmentally. They reach up for
toys, they reach out for us when we get close and talk to them," she
said.
The girls were born via cesarean section at nearly eight months'
gestation and will be separated at Texas Children's Hospital in
Houston by a team of surgeons in a long and arduous procedure.
"The intestines appear to be intermingled but there appears to be
enough intestines for both children," said Dr. Darrell Cass,
pediatric surgeon and co-director of Texas Children's Hospital Fetal
Center.
The surgery will occur in two shifts with teams of pediatric,
urological, plastic, orthopedic, cardiac and gynecological surgeons.
The separation team will start and the reconstruction team will
complete the process.
Surgeons at Texas Children's Hospital in 1992 successfully separated
Tiesha and Iesha Turner, who were 1 year old and shared a sternum,
liver, entwined intestines and fused organs.
Conjoined twins occur once every 200,000 births and most do not
survive. Approximately 40 to 60 percent of conjoined twins arrive
stillborn, and about 35 percent live only one day, according to the
University of Maryland Medical Center.
Mortality rates for twins who do live and then undergo separation
vary, depending on their type of connection and the organs they
share, it said.
The Mata family's life began to change in January when a routine
ultrasound showed that Elysse Mata was carrying conjoined twins.
They were referred to the Texas Children’s Hospital Fetal Center.
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The couple and their 5-year-old son relocated from Lubbock to
Houston, where the girls were born on April 11.
The babies live in the hospital’s Level IV Neonatal Intensive Care
Unit, which is the center of the Mata family’s life.
Elysse Mata spends at least seven hours at the hospital each day,
leaving when it is time to pick her son up from school. John Mata,
her husband, works full time and spends every weekend at the
hospital with his daughters.
Cass said he expects each child to be able to live independently and
to have a good life.
"It is likely further reconstructive surgeries may be needed in the
future. Perhaps the biggest challenges may be orthopedic and in
helping them walk and have normal gait," he said.
(Writing by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Mohammad Zargham)
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