A 26-year-old woman from Haryana has given birth to a rare set of conjoined twins, with two heads and one body.
The baby girls, who share the same heart and stomach, weighed 3.5kg at the time of their birth at the Cygnus JK Hindu Hospital in Sonipat, last week, Daily Mail reported.
The conjoined twins, however, have separate spines, necks, oesophagi, windpipe and lungs, New York Daily News reported.
According to various media reports, the parents - Subhash Sharma, who works at a bicycle factory, and his wife Urmila - were too poor to afford the cost of ultrasound and came to know of the rare occurrence only when the latter started getting severe pains in the stomach recently and had her first ultrasound after conceiving the child.
"When my wife started to feel pain in her stomach we rushed to see a doctor. When we came to know about them there were no words, there was no way out, we were very shocked. It was all in God's hands," Subhash, 32, told New York Daily News.
Dr. Shikha Malik, who attended the case, said that they are trying hard to save the twins. "So far they are doing remarkably well. It is a gift that they have come this far. We can only pray that there is a future for them," Malik told New York Daily News. "We are trying all we can to help them and we're speaking to experts from all over the world to see if there's any chance of surgery. But it is looking unlikely at the moment."
As Urmila, a mother of two, is still undergoing treatment at the Cygnus J.K. Hindu Hospital, the four-day-old babies have been shifted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences Hospital (AIIMS), in Delhi for better treatment.
Conjoined twins, a much-talked about subject among medical enthusiasts around the world, are formed when a woman releases a single egg that fails to separate completely after fertilisation. Though the embryo starts splitting into two, the process stops in the middle, and the partial separation results in conjoined twins.
According to health experts at the University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore in the US, such births are very rare. One out of every 2,00,000 live births have very few chances of survival - between five percent and 25 percent.
American conjoined twins Abby and Brittany Hensel (24) have been making headlines since their birth in Minnesota in the year 1990, for beating the odds and living with two heads and one body. The conjoined twins graduated from the Bethel University in the US last year and reportedly started their career as primary school teachers, according to BBC News.
Watch the video of the baby here:
