Positivity: Egyptian Twins Going Home After Successful Separation Operation
They want to see their grandma (link requires registration; HT Large Bill):
For twins, time to go home–With boys separated and doing well, family moving back to Egypt
Ahmed and Mohamed Ibrahim have shaken hands with a president, snuggled with Oprah and shared the stage with an Egyptian rock star. Soon, though, they will meet the one icon who matters most: Grandma.
‘No one else could do what they did for my kids,’ says Ibrahim Mohamed Ibrahim of the doctors who separated Ahmed (left) and Mohamed, who came to Dallas in 2002.
More than three years after they arrived in Dallas, joined at the crowns of their heads, the twin boys fly out for Egypt on Saturday. Strapped into separate seats, Ahmed and Mohamed will, for the first time, go home.
They were brought to this moment by a marathon operation and months of care, but they are not the only ones who return transformed. The twins’ parents are no longer the same anxious, flustered souls who arrived in the U.S. Likewise, in other ways, the boys have left a mark on the medical experts who cared for them, galvanized friendships across languages and cultures, and inspired generosity from people they have never met.
“We can’t thank the people of Dallas enough,” the twins’ mother, Sabah Abu el-Wafa, said through a translator. “They gave us what we wanted.”
What she wanted was the giddiness of the son who can today dart like a ping-pong ball around the family’s Dallas apartment, interrupting all who will listen, pausing momentarily to channel surf. Or the delight of the other son who can now sit beside her, engrossed in the buttons of a guest’s cellphone.
Ahmed and Mohamed, now 4, have become versed in Elmo, Batman, and mac and cheese, but they know little of their homeland. They have never seen the village in the Nile Valley where their parents were reared and their brother and sister still live, having been rushed to a Cairo hospital soon after their birth.
They arrived at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport one hot day in June 2002, just after their first birthday. The Dallas-based World Craniofacial Foundation, which arranges medical care for poor children with skull deformities, sponsored their trip and arranged their treatment.
Here, doctors learned that fused skulls were not the boys’ most daunting problem. Huddling beneath the bone, a thicket of veins bound the twins together. A team from the practice Neurosurgeons for Children would spend a year plotting the separation of the two. On Oct 13, 2003 – after 34 hours of work by a room of more than 50 surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses and staff – a custom-built operating table was rolled apart.
“We have two boys,” a nurse announced to the waiting family.
