Twins separated in 7-hour surgery

Surgeons successfully separated Allyson and Avery Clark in a surgery Tuesday that took nearly seven hours — more than half of which was prep time spent draping, cleaning and arranging the girls.

Now the babies, who turn 8 months old today, are for the first time resting in separate beds.

Avery was wheeled out of the operating room at 1:54 p.m., and Allyson followed 11 minutes later. They were to spend the night in the intensive-care unit at Primary Children's Medical Center before moving to a regular room later today.

The girls are the daughters of Kerry and Anna Clark. Kerry Clark, 28, is an F-16 crew chief at Hill Air Force Base, and the family, which includes three other girls under age 7, lives on the base.

Kerry Clark was smiling just moments after the operation was finished. "It couldn't be any better. There was no bad news at all," he said.

Asked how his daughters looked, he said it was "kind of strange" to see them separated. "They're a lot skinnier-looking, a lot more compact," he laughed.

When surgeons told the parents that the operation was over, he said his wife, who had been very nervous, got really excited. And he wasn't as calm as he thought he'd be.

"I started shaking, and I'm not really a shaker. I don't get too emotional," he said. "The phone's been ringing like crazy. This is definitely great."

Although they don't know if there will be complications or another procedure or two down the road for the infants, Kerry Clark said, "Everything that can happen from now on is stuff (PCMC doctors) do every day anyway. Simple stuff."

The girls were born joined at the base of their tailbones, and their spinal cords looped down like the letter U and connected. Lead surgeon Dr. John Kestle, a neurosurgeon, said when the doctors opened the infants' dura, the fluid-filled sac that protects the spinal cord, they saw a space with nerves dangling on either side. The surgeons made the cut between those nerves.

"Things went well, we think," Kestle said. "We divided the tissue connecting the spinal cords. We are very happy with what we found. It looked like the connection was below the nerves."

The surgeons had also worried about some large blood vessels in the area of the conjoinment that might be hard to separate, but they were "managed without difficulty," and neither girl required a blood transfusion during the operation. After surgery, they were breathing on their own.