US surgeons on Tuesday successfully separated conjoined two-year-old girls born in the

US surgeons on Tuesday successfully separated conjoined two-year-old girls born in the Philippines, bringing tears to the eyes of their mother who praised God for keeping them alive.

A team of 20 doctors helped by 15-20 operating staff at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital worked for 10 hours to separate Angelina and Angelica Sabuco, who had spent all of their lives so far joined at the chest and abdomen.

Lead surgeon Gary Hartman at the hospital in the northern Californian city of Palo Alto, said they expected the girls to make a “complete recovery.”

The twins were in intensive care and sedated, but may begin to be woken up and are likely to spend a week in the ICU and another week in hospital if all goes well, the hospital said.

Hartman told reporters the surgery took slightly longer than anticipated, with the riskiest part, dividing the girls’ livers, going slowly but smoothly.

Plastic surgeon Peter Lorenz, who led the reconstruction procedures, said there would be relatively little sign of the twins’ past, after the operation.

The girls, who turned two in August, were joined at the chest and belly but had separate brains, hearts, kidneys, stomachs and intestines.

Before the operation doctors said they expected to take six hours to separate the girls and two to three hours more to conduct reconstruction work.

It was lead surgeon Hartman’s sixth operation on conjoined twins. The most recent set separated at the hospital were Yurelia and Fiorella Rocha-Arias of Costa Rica in November 2007.

Ginady learned her babies were conjoined when she was seven months pregnant and her husband was working in San Jose, California.

Source AFP