Dr Goh and other members of the medical team said the surgery took so long because they had to deal with hundreds of interwoven blood vessels in the girls' brains. Siamese twins joined at the head are very rare, occurring once in 2 million live births, according to Dr Goh. Successful separations are even more uncommon. A similar operation was successfully performed in South Africa in 1997. Ganga and Jamuna, the twins in the Singapore surgery, are the only children of a poor couple from the remote Nepalese mountain village of Khalanga, where Maoist guerillas are active.
Doctors say the girls have distinct personalities.
Ganga, who has a cleft palate, is friskier and always hungry, while Jamuna is more shy. The girls' mother, Sandhya, is a kindergarten teacher and their father, Bushan, helps his father in a small business. The couple, who are in their 20s, kept almost constant vigil at the hospital during the operation with brief breaks to pray at a Hindu temple. A surgeon in Nepal referred the family to doctors in Singapore. Before the surgery, doctors rehearsed the procedure in virtual reality using a three-dimensional imaging system developed in Singapore.