Health

Rare conjoined twin returns home after successful separation surgery

Written by ABC AUDIO ALL RIGHTS RESERVED on March 23, 2023

(FORT WORTH, Texas) — One Texas family is celebrating an extra special homecoming this week.

Five-month-old baby JamieLynn Finley was discharged from the Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, on Tuesday, two months after undergoing successful separation surgery from her conjoined twin sister AmieLynn, according to a hospital press release.

“We’re excited that we get to get her home,” JamieLynn’s father James Finley said in a press release. “We’ll have some good bonding time, but at the same time, Amie is still up there so it’s kind of a double-edged sword. We’re happy Jamie is coming home, but they’re not going to be together for a bit.”

AmieLynn will remain in the Cook Children’s neonatal intensive care unit as she continues to recover from the surgery. She is expected to be able to go home within a month or so, according to the release.

However, JamieLynn and AmieLynn were side-by-side Tuesday to celebrate the milestone.

“We’ve been looking forward to this for a long time,” the girls’ doctor, Mary Frances Lynch, M.D., a neonatologist at Cook Children’s, said in the press release.

JamieLynn and AmieLynn made history in January as the first conjoined twins to ever be surgically separated at Cook Children’s, according to the hospital.

The surgery lasted 11 hours and involved a team of 25 medical professionals to separate the sisters, who were born conjoined at the chest and sharing a liver.

“Conjoined twins that reach and stay viable after birth, at least for the first few days, there’s really only about five or eight of those on the entire planet…. So it is a very rare situation,” Dr. Jose Iglesias, medical director of pediatric surgery at Cook Children’s Medical Center and the lead surgeon for the twins’ separation surgery said in January.

Finley and his wife Amanda Arciniega told the hospital that JamieLynn will “miss the attention” from the nurses and healthcare workers in the NICU, but that the little one will be showered with love at home from her three older siblings.

“Everybody is ready to see them,” said Finley.