Chennai: Grace, 20, has travelled a long distance from her small tribal village ‘Kasumulu’ close to Lake Malawi in southwest Tanzania when she arrived at the Apollo Hospital here with her precious bundle of conjoined twin babies in the hope that its surgeons will ‘liberate’ the boys from their miserable muddle.
It’s truly an amazing tale of tears, grit and hope as this poor tribal woman made her way from the village dispensary to the district hospital to undergo a cesarean section and from there to the ‘big hospital’ at capital Dar es Salaam by ambulance, a journey of three days, with the newborns, one sheet of cloth wrapped around her and another sheet covering the conjoined twins.
The doctors at the district hospital had found it extremely difficult to deliver the boys as they were joined at the buttocks in what is known as ‘Pygopagus twins’, an extremely rare occurrence. Only one in 2,00,000 deliveries could be conjoined twins and of them, just 17 per cent are Pygopagus (joined at the buttocks). Medical literature till now has recorded 30 sets of Pygopagus twins of whom only four were male.
For this illiterate tribal woman, it must have been a terrible task to first convince her impoverished family that it was important to seek modern medicine men for solution to its bad luck—tribal communities usually killed such babies considering them evil—and then dare to undertake the long journey all by herself. Husband Erick Nwakyusa supposedly stayed back in the village to take care of the first child, now four-years-old; but some say he deserted her because she delivered the ‘unusual’.
Grace now needs the prayers and good wishes from all, apart from the success of the skills of the extremely talented Apollo team, to be able to carry a smile back home in Kasumulu with her two bubbly boys, successfully separated from their terrible ‘bond’, and reunite with the family.
She would have to bring the boys back to Apollo six months later for one more surgical procedure—construction of functional penis for both the boys, who now have a fused phallus, one of the most challenging tasks for the surgeons.
“The boys have even learned to say athai and thatha and their mother too has picked up a smattering of Tamil”, said Apollo’s joint managing director Suneeta Reddy, adding that the Tanzanian government would pay Rs 30-40 lakh towards the cost of this complicated procedure and her father-chairman Pratap Reddy has decided to waive the rest of the expenses “because this is not just about money, it’s about giving life to these lovely kids from a faraway African village; it’s about proving our medical capabilities to the world”.
