Conjoined Twins Successfully Separated and Now at Home Doing Great

Dozens of doctors and nurses at Texas Children’s Hospital dedicated months of their time to caring for conjoined twin babies Ella and Eliza Fuller.

Thanks to their extraordinary efforts, the sisters are now separate and living at home with their parents, Sandy and Jesse, and big sister, Emilia.

“Texas Children’s Hospital was a place of comfort and hope for our family,” Sandy Fuller said in a statement provided by the hospital. “From the beginning to the end, we were guided, informed and comforted. We are so grateful God put some of the best doctors and nurses in our lives to give our girls the best chance at life.”

Speaking with the NBC Today show, the girls’ mother said she learned that her unborn daughters were conjoined early in her second trimester. Further testing showed that the twins were connected at the abdomen and shared a liver.

“Four weeks after we found out there were twins, we … confirmed that they were conjoined,” she explained. “We were shocked.”

The family quickly found specialists to care for the girls at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston – something that helped ease their worries.

“It was kind of a blessing and a curse finding out that early because we’ve had so much time to think about it,” dad Jesse Fuller said.

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For the next several months, the Fullers worked with doctors to create a plan for the girls’ arrival and separation surgery. And on March 1, the girls were born via C-section at 35 weeks of pregnancy.

Their mother remembered: “It was a beautiful experience because I just knew, ‘Oh my gosh, my babies that I’ve been carrying in here are now outside the womb.’ They’re good — and they immediately started to cry.”

Ella and Eliza spent the first few months of their lives outside the womb at the hospital, growing under the watchful care of the medical team.

“Conjoined twins offer new challenges, and each one is different,” Dr. Jonathan Davies, co-leader of the conjoined twin clinical program, told Today.

Overall, Davies said dozens of doctors and nurses were involved in the twins’ care.

“We have to sort of specialize just for them — from the simplest things of how we position them in the bed and move the around to when we give medications, how we’re giving them medications and what dosage that we use,” he said. “That’s a lot easier when you have one baby in one bed … [than] when you have two babies side by side. That becomes much trickier, and there’s a lot of potential for risks.”

On June 14, a team of 17 doctors and nurses separated the twins in a six-hour procedure, with pediatric surgeon Dr. Alice King in the lead.

“Our team began planning and preparing for this operation before these babies were even born,” King said in a statement. “From conducting simulations of the procedure, to collaborating extensively with our colleagues in anesthesiology, maternal-fetal medicine, neonatology and radiology, we have all been working together to achieve one common goal: the best outcome for Ella and Eliza.”

Afterward, the hospital said the girls made a “swift recovery,” and Ella and Eliza went home last week.

Now, the Fuller family can begin enjoying a normal life together. Jesse Fuller said each day is better than the last.

“I was super excited to see them separate and doing good,” he said. “It’s definitely getting easier as the days go on. They’re getting better, stronger.”

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