Surgeon who tried to separate Laleh and Ladan tells of heartbreak
Eighteen months after carrying out an operation to separate Siamese twins from Iran, a Singaporean neurosurgeon has spoken of his continuing sadness at the failure of the surgery.
'I feel sad. I feel very sad that the patients did not survive. But when I look back and ask myself if we could have done things differently, I don't think we could have,' said Keith Goh Yu-ching, associate professor of neurosurgery at Chinese University.
Dr Goh recalled the dilemma he faced before carrying out the operation, as he spoke to the Sunday Morning Post ahead of the premiere of the documentary Dying to be Apart on the Discovery Channel tonight. The documentary details the extraordinary story behind 29-year-old Laleh and Ladan Bijani's decision to opt for surgery - risking death for the dream of leading separate lives.
Dr Goh led a team of 28 doctors trying to separate the sisters, but they died of blood loss during the operation in July 2003.
'I was terrified because I knew the chance of a poor outcome. The risk was very high ... I knew I was putting my reputation at risk.'
But it was professionalism that prevented him from 'running away' from the job.
'Rather than abandoning the patients, when we realised they would have surgery whatever the outcome, we tried to do our best to create the best environment to pull them through,' he said.
In fact, the decision to go ahead with the operation was only made after an eight-month study and evaluation by the medical team at Raffles Hospital in Singapore, as well as gaining the green light from the hospital's ethics committee.
'The way people observed them was that they had spent 29 years living in a conjoined manner,' Dr Goh said. 'Most people looking at them thought that hey, they had quite a good life, they could go to university, study, live in their own apartment.
'Most people thought they were fine, but it was only after we did many studies that we realised that actually they were not fine.'
The smiling faces the twins showed the world belied the psychological and physical torment they had suffered over the years.
'The girls really had serious problems,' Dr Goh said. 'They were severely malformed, they were stuck together ... the pressure in their head almost three times that of a normal person. Sooner or later they would have gone blind, paralysed or had a stroke, or go into a coma.'
Because of brain pressure, the twins suffered serious headaches and had to take 10 sleeping pills a night. Their condition meant that even things such as watching television and reading newspapers was extremely difficult.
Two weeks after the surgery, Dr Goh successfully separated two four-month-old sisters from South Korea joined at the lower back. In 2001, he led a team of doctors to separate 18-month-old Nepalese twins who were joined at the head.
Despite their death, the twins' courage shines on. In an emotional ending to the documentary, Laleh is seen asking her twin sister: 'Will you stay with me after separation?'
A smiling Ladan joked: 'I will get rid of you and escape.' She quickly added: 'No, I'm kidding. I'll be with you wherever you go ... even after surgery, no one will separate us.'
