Girl Dies After Second Head Is Removed

Medicine & Biotech Forum

An infant girl died Saturday after surgery to remove a second head, her mother said.

A medical team completed the operation Friday evening but said 8-week-old Rebeca Martinez had been susceptible to infection or hemorrhaging. The baby died 12 hours after the surgery, believed to be the first of its kind.

"She was too little to resist the surgery," the mother, 26-year-old Maria Gisela Hiciano, said by telephone from her home, sobbing softly.

Hiciano said doctors told her Rebeca died around 6 a.m.

The second head, which doctors said threatened the girl's development, grew from the top of Rebeca's skull and had its own partly developed brain, ears, eyes and lips.

During the surgery, 18 surgeons, nurses and doctors had taken several rotations to cut off the undeveloped tissue, clip the veins and arteries, and close the skull using a bone and skin graft from the second head.

Doctors had warned her parents that Rebeca confronted "the second big risk, the post-operation recovery," according to Dr. Santiago Hazim, medical director of Santo Domingo's Center for Orthopedic Specialties, where the surgery was performed.

The operation was critical because the head on top was growing faster than the lower one, said Dr. Jorge Lazareff, the lead brain surgeon and director of pediatric neurosurgery at the University of California at Los Angeles' Mattel Children's Hospital.

Lazareff led a team that successfully separated conjoined Guatemalan twin girls in 2002.

Hiciano and her husband, 29-year-old Franklin Martinez, have two other children, ages 4 and 1.

Source: AP

How sad

We've come so far, medically... with all the things that we can do, and it's a shame that we couldn't save her life. I know, 'stuff happens' but your heart just goes out when you read about things like this.

Very sad. Also very strange that this is a parasytic twin. I saw that special on Discovery Health on how rare it is.

it gives me the heebie-jeebies. Fact is stranger than fiction.

It looked so sad, did anyone see her with her second head on? It just looked so sad (and gross).

The poor parents, to go through the pregnancy, be told it was a tumour and give birth and it's really a second head of a parastic twin, to go through the trauma of deciding to have the operation at the risk of the child's life, to get through the surgery and then have the baby die in recovery. What an ordeal.

There is never a choice with a parasitic twin. The parasite has to be removed, or the healthy twin dies. So tragic. I saw a program that said that 1 in 8 of us was a twin and the other died in the first few weeks of pregnancy. Strange

My family has no history of twins in it, but my Aunt, her first pregnancy was twins, but one of them miscarried very early in the term and she was lucky to keep the other child. Then she miscarried a set of twins, then she had another set of twins, but one was still born.

So it seems to me that twins is a pretty dicey business no matter which way you look at it. I guess my aunt was just lucky that all her twins at least seperated.

Man, that is sad. I remember seeing this story on the AP wire. I wonder how things like this can be avoided.

-HECK!

That is the thing HECK, they can't . It is an error that occurs very early in pregnancy. The first embryo dies and is enveloped or partial enveloped in the second twin. All of this happens when they are mostly cells. Very sad and extremely rare.

You would think they could tell the difference between a tumor on a foetus and another head growing out of it though. To be told it was a tumor and give birth and instead it's two heads. What is this the 1800's?

There are a type of tumor that grow hair and nails. As for the other head, they are not a head as we are used to seeing. Very primative.