Heart monitors beeped rhythmically as Scarlett and Savannah, twin girls born conjoined at the heart, liver, sternum and diaphragm, were reunited Wednesday for the first time since being surgically separated in June.
The girls, both 4 months old, were rolled into a UF Health press conference by their mother, Jacquelyn. Wearing matching blue floral dresses, Scarlett slept in her car seat perched on a double stroller, and Savannah blinked amid doctors, nurses and cameras.
Three months ago, however, there was little hope they would survive their rare separation at UF Health Shands Hospital, which spanned about eight hours with 12 individual procedures.
“From one end to the other, it’s been an amazing experience — a real roller coaster of a ride,” the girls’ father, Mark, said at the press conference. “We’re just thankful for everybody, all the staff — from the CEO to the lady that cleaned our room.”
The girls were born April 12 at Shands after being referred there from another hospital when their mother was 22 weeks pregnant, said Dr. Jennifer Co-Vu, a UF Health specialist in fetal cardiac care.
“We have followed them throughout the pregnancy, and we have had multiple interdisciplinary meetings as to what the plan is,” Co-Vu said. “When we saw the babies’ heart, we thought, ‘Maybe there is a plan of possible separation.’”
Mark and Jackie, who declined to give their last names, were given three options: The babies could both die, one could survive or they could both live.
“We are very humbled that the parents decided to trust us and say, ‘Let’s try separation,’” Co-Vu said.
The team that would eventually separate the twins consisted of surgeons, radiologists, neonatologists and several others from different departments. They spent hundreds of hours planning the procedures, Co-Vu said.
From a cardiac computerized tomography scan, the team was able to print a 3-D, to-scale model of the heart Scarlett and Savannah shared, which later became two separate hearts. The model was the first of its kind, according to a press release. Co-Vu said the model proved invaluable in the planning of the separation surgery.
A UF Health Shands Hospital doctor shows a 3-D printed model of the twins’ heart that helped them see if separation was possible.
Dr. Mark Bleiweis, the chief of pediatric and congenital cardiovascular surgery at UF Health, said finally seeing Scarlett and Savannah separated made all the hard work worth it.
“The importance of doing something like this is obvious,” he said. “We take a set of twins and we separate them — we basically gave them their life, and this is a wonderful thing for this family. It was an incredible feeling. Every day when you go in and see the babies in separate cribs, it’s phenomenal.”
Since the surgery, the twins have been recovering at the hospital. They are now preparing to go home for the first time, their parents said.
“We wanted so much to see them separated; now it just feels so good to see them back together again,” Mark said. “The whole experience was certainly something that we didn’t plan for, but it just went so well.”
Savannah (left) and Scarlett, once conjoined twins, are separated for the first time after 12 procedures.
