Conjoined twins Emma and Taylor Bailey’s parents face an agonising decision about their future. Isabel Jensen reports.
When Emma and Taylor Bailey blew out the candles on their third birthday cake a few months ago, their mother Mandy was close to tears. Her twin girls had defied doctors who said they wouldn’t survive.
But while the sight filled her with happiness, it also terrified her. For every birthday – every week – brings the family closer to making an agonising decision about their future.
The girls, who are conjoined, have only one heart and also share a liver. They are fused from breastbone to navel, and when they were born, doctors put their chance of survival at less than 10 per cent. Emma and Taylor proved experts wrong, but now, Mandy, 32, and her husband Tor, 34, from Arizona in the US, have been told their little girls will need to be separated in one to two years’ time.
As the twins grow, more strain is placed on their shared heart. It will become weaker, and is likely to fail if they are not separated.
Twins who share a heart have never been successfully separated, and doctors warn surgery carries many risks.
Details are uncertain, but it is likely both girls will need heart transplants and one a liver.
Mandy, also mum to Paige, 11, Drew, 9, Cole, 7, and Blake, 2, explains, “There’s a tiny window of time for a separation. We have to get it completely right. If we wait too long, then the operation cannot go ahead.”
Read the full story in this week’s Woman’s Day, on sale March 29, 2010.
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