PRESENT POINT POWER

The parents, Sonia Fierros, 23, and Federico Salinas, 36
at the ICU after the operation

Regina and Renata Salinas Fierros, born as one, became two for the first time when doctors made the final incision in a long and complicated 24-hour surgery to separate the 10-month-old conjoined twins at the Children's Hospital Los Angeles
The two babies are now in the intensive care unit . "The first 48 hours are the most important," said Steve Rutledge, a spokesman for the hospital. "It's too early to assign a condition to them, but doctors were very optimistic about how the surgery went and the fact that it was finished quicker than they had anticipated."
The marathon procedure began at 6 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Wednesday, and doctors had expected that it would take 24 hours to separate the girls and to reconstruct their tiny bodies after they divided some of the organs the two shared.
The long complicated procedure ended at 2:47 a.m. when Regina was wheeled into the ICU with her sister Renata following at 3:58 a.m. The babies were placed next to each other, in separate beds.
The parents, Sonia Fierros, 23, and Federico Salinas, 36, were delighted to hear that the surgery had been a success so far. The parents are from Juarez, Mexico. Last spring, when Ms. Fierros was pregnant, she was hospitalized with a urinary tract infection while in Los Angeles to visit relatives and learned then that she was carrying conjoined twins.
The couple decided to stay in Los Angeles on an extended tourist visa because they thought their babies would receive better medical care there.The twins were born Aug. 2, 2005, facing each other, joined from the lower chest to the pelvis. They were fused in several places, including the liver and genitals, and shared a large intestine. Regina was born with one kidney.
After 12 hours into the surgery, the last pelvic bone connecting the babies was cut, and there was jubilation in the team as doctors moved one of the twins to another room,
The work to make each of them whole continued on into the night as doctors worked to reconstruct their chest walls and pelvis regions and sew up surgical wounds.
They had been fused at the front, but had separate heads, necks, shoulders, hearts, lungs, arms and legs. One of the girls' legs faced backward, and during the surgery, doctors readjusted the bone structure to make them face forward and enable her to walk correctly.
Worldwide, only a few hundred pairs of conjoined twins are born each year and in the US, they occur 1 in every 200,000 live births.
Several of those on the 80-member team working on the Salinas twins took part in which was considered a success, but this surgery was more complex because more organ systems were involved than another conjoined twin separation at the hospital in 2003.