Children's Hospital Team Performs Delicate Operation to Separate Them
By Sue Anne Pressley Montes and Susan Levine
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 7, 2006
Four-month-old conjoined twins were separated yesterday after more than 12 hours of surgery by a huge medical team at Children's Hospital, whose success at 8:58 p.m. only presaged hours more work reconstructing organs and closing the babies' massive wounds.
The hospital announced the crucial moment on its Web site, saying "the final piece of tissue holding Mateo and McHale Shaw was cut, giving them separate lives."
Early today, the hospital said that surgeons had nearly completed the twins' reconstructive surgery, and that the boys -- who had endured nearly 16 hours on the operating table at that point -- would soon be reunited with their parents.
The twins, whose parents live in Sheboygan, Wis., were born May 10 at Washington Hospital Center in a Caesarean delivery and were immediately transferred to the neonatal intensive care unit at Children's. They were joined at the lower back, including part of the spinal column, requiring extraordinary planning for a surgery that doctors there have called unprecedented.
Yesterday, members of the 65-person medical team wore orange or green caps to correspond with the baby they were working on. One of their most painstaking and critical procedures was determining what belonged to each child and whether there were separate spinal cord nerves to be untangled; the goal, said Kurt Newman, chief of surgery at Children's, was to preserve as much neurological function as possible for each child.
Late in the evening, lead surgeon Robert Keating told the Associated Press that Mateo and McHale were doing well and were in their own operating rooms. He cautioned that "they have a fair amount of defects" and said it will be days or weeks before their recovery can be gauged.
The twins' short lives have been marked by high drama. Their mother, Angie Benzschawel, 25, arrived at Washington Hospital Center in anticipation of the difficult birth when she was 28 weeks pregnant. The twins' father and her fiancé, Ryan Shaw, 28, accompanied her.
In addition to a split malformation of the spinal cord, the infants had a diagnosis of spina bifida, a congenital defect caused by the spine's failure to close properly, and hydrocephalus, an abnormal accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain that doctors said further complicated yesterday's surgery.
Keeping the twins' parents company during the early hours of surgery were Kevin and Melissa Buckles of Stafford County. The Buckleses' 2-year-old daughters, Jade and Erin, were born conjoined at the chest and were separated in a 2004 operation at Children's. The girls and their 4-year-old sister, Taylor, accompanied their parents yesterday.
"We just came to be there, to be there for them if they needed us," Kevin Buckles said. "If they wanted to talk, we were here. If they didn't want to talk, that was fine, too."
During their time at Children's, the boys have grown well. Mateo now weighs 12.5 pounds; McHale, 10. In an interview this week with the Sheboygan Press, Keating said that although McHale's neurological function was not working below the knee at birth, it had improved as he "borrowed" function from his bigger brother.
Their father said he and Benzschawel are optimistic about the surgery's outcome: "That's the only way you can go into something like this," Shaw told the Associated Press this week. "The boys made it this far. Our spirit is very high."
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