also been dramatic. the function of his right hand right now is 50 percentage improvement more than in the past because in the past he cannot open it and right now he has the ability to open his fingers. hold the toy. put it in my hand. good. and while dr. samy acknowledges the twins amazing growth, he still has concerns for them and their future. the success of the separation is the state of the children after the separation. the success of the operation is to have a kid, a good citizenship, a kid independent. and much of that success depends on their education, which is a major concern for the family. the private school they attended is no longer available to the twins. so the family is looking for a school that can meet their needs. translator: i just hope they can go to school, and i think they will need private tutoring to learn how to write. i just want them to go to school, do well, and see them become something big. happy birthday to you [ singing in a foreign la
everything made sense. we all had this image in our minds of what we would find, and as we turned each corner we found it. just the way you expected it would be? well, it took a year, so, i mean for all the warnings beforehand, the surgery itself is going smoothly. when swift and the other surgeons confront that tangled confusion of blood vessels, it parts just as they hoped it would, with minimal bleeding. they don t know if the divided blood systems will function correctly. not yet. but so far the news is good. word goes out. during the progress of the separation that everything was going fine, i was not surprised. i knew that the hands of god were there in surgery, in the o.r. and then the one moment that surprises them. all the tests had told swift that the boys brains, though squeezed tightly together, were entirely separate. but are they? let s say you have two wet pieces of paper and they stick together. well, sometimes they come apart and each page is one.
and sometimes if you keep tearing, it will tear the other page, you know, a lot. so it wasn t a question of them, actually the brains had become fused. no. they were stuck together, and we had to pry them apart. okay. we re getting ready to separate. finally, the moment arrived. we re moving back. we re moving back. one, two, three, move back. we released the yoke that held the tables together, and we just gradually pulled them apart. we looked in, looked in, and they were separate. the twins are now separated. but amazingly, there s almost no reaction in the operating room. we ve got the two boys, and of course they re separate, but there s hours of work to be done. not like you d go hooray and celebrate. no, not at that point. not at that point. but if the mood in the o.r. is business-like and calm, the waiting room is anything but. there s a rush of emotions.
the kids and what the outcome of the surgery might be. and then there s the ethical question of whether to risk sacrificing one life to save another. there are some forms of conjoined twins where you really have one that s a parasite. so there it s not a decision. but when you have two total human beings, i don t think that s a good solution. i don t like that approach. i m not on a plan of sacrifice one. i m on a plan of save two kids. you know that your chances of saving two kids is not that good. chances are not good. but we have to go for that. to me that s the only way. and it s possible. coming up next doctors weigh the medical options while the twins father turns to his faith. he s kind of put it in the hands of god. he has. oom dumped me here. oh, oh. oooh! will love ever come my way? oh my! i believe in miracles
machines, and generous financing would all combine to make sense of the impossible choice. but time and tests revealed an outlook which was even more complicated than anybody had imagined. this is an orchestration of the most complex surgical procedure that occurs on this earth. there s no question about that in my mind. these are the images that confront dr. salyer. a tangled confusion of blood vessels he s never seen before. major veins that originate in one twin, snaking their way deep into the other twin s head. mohamed and ahmed are not only stuck firmly together, they depend on each other for their lives. mohamed, the smaller but more outgoing twin, has more delicate, narrower veins in his head than his brother, and salyer is forced to concede he is the more vulnerable in surgery. surgery they re not even sure is possible. as we ve moved through it,