JOHNS HOPKINS Conjoined twin dies after separation surgery, other twin remains stable

Doctors are hopeful that Lea Block will recover.
BALTIMORE (AP) -- One of the year-old conjoined twin girls who underwent surgery to separate their heads died shortly after the procedure was completed, a spokeswoman for the Johns Hopkins Children's Center said early today.
Lea and Tabea Block, from Lemgo, Germany, were successfully separated at 12:15 a.m. today, but Tabea died later "after an exhaustive resuscitative effort," hospital spokeswoman Staci Vernick Goldberg said.
Lea was in critical but stable condition and "doing well" in the hospital's pediatric intensive care unit, Goldberg said.
"We extend our deepest sympathy to the parents and family of Tabea Block," Goldberg said. "At the same time, we have great hope that Lea will remain strong, recover well and grow into a healthy young girl."
The surgery to separate the girls resumed Wednesday at 6 a.m., four days after the operation was halted when the condition of one twin became unstable.
Progress
On Wednesday afternoon, more than 10 hours in the second operation, the hospital announced that doctors were halfway through a critical stage, separation of a web of blood vessels at the back of the head known as the dural venous complex.
Late Wednesday night, the hospital reported that the surgical team, led by Dr. Ben Carson, continued to "tease apart brain tissue, and separate the blood vessels that the twins still share."
Once the girls were separated, doctors had planned to reconstruct the dura, the tough fibrous covering of the brain, and close their scalps, the spokeswoman said.
Surgery began and then was stopped Saturday when complications caused the condition of one of the twins to have heart problems. The hospital did not identify which of the twins suffered the heart problem.
Doctors had planned to resume surgery within a week if the twins remained stable and decided to resume because they had remained so, Goldberg said.
The surgery was originally expected to last between 24 and 48 hours. The twins were joined at the tops of their heads and shared several blood vessels between their brains.
Carson was part of a team last year that made the first attempt to separate adult twins joined at the head. The two Iranian women, Laleh and Ladan Bijani, 29, died during the three-day surgery in Singapore.
Carson also led a team in 1987 that separated 7-month-old boys from Germany, using for the first time a procedure in which their circulatory system was bypassed and their bodies were cooled to preserve brain function. In 1997, he led a team of South African doctors in the first successful separation of vertically conjoined twins.