photo- Baby with two heads born in Lagos

 

      A woman on Tuesday, December 13th, gave birth to two-headed baby at Med-In Specialist Hospital located at Oshogbo Street in Ogudu,Lagos.

    According to doctors at the hospital, the baby born around 6:30pm through an elective caesarean section, has two heads, a neck, chest, two legs and two hands. The mother and medics were expecting a set of twins as indicated by the various scans she underwent in the course of the pregnancy.
According to one of the nurses who was in the delivery room, they had prepared two cots for each of the twins but were shocked when they saw that they were conjoined. "This is the first time I am seeing anything like this. I have watched it in movies but seeing it in real life was such an experience for me. Thankfully, the surgeon ensured that they survived.

"As I speak to you, the mother doesn’t know the condition of the babies. She still believes and expects to carry her twins. We haven’t told her yet. Only her husband was brought into the theatre to see his children and he was the one who went with the doctors to LUTH,"  said the nurse.
In medical parlance, the condition is known as Parapagus. It is a rare form of partial twinning where there are two heads and two necks side by side on one torso. Such cases are rampant in India and doctors say they cannot be separated since they have only one pair of arms and one pair of legs and one heart.
This disorder is different from conjoined twins as the baby has only one set of internal organs. The extremely rare case is thought to be brought on during the early stages of pregnancy as a result of genetic mutation. Med-In Hospital Manager Dare Moses said the baby was taken to Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) so that tests can be conducted to ascertain if they share also vital organs like hearts and lungs.

"There is need to find out if they share major organs together. They may have to be flown abroad for separation if they have separate hearts and other vital organs. It is possible for them to survive. I have seen cases of twins like this in movie surviving and living normal lives. Normally, when we have cases of pregnant woman expecting twins, we usually go for elective caesarean, which was what the mother opted for. But when the doctor was trying to extract one of the babies (first one), it got stuck and when he examined further, he discovered that there were two heads in one body. We are happy that the baby was delivered alive and placed on oxygen. Both heads were alive.