The parents has said a circus tried to buy the child, after which the parents hid her.

The operation has begun and doctors are confident the child will be Normal after surgery.

OMG! I hope everything works out for her. The operation sounds quite complicated so best of luck to her…

shit – avaski, I voted your comment up, but the screen moved faster then my mouse and voted it down. I’m sorry friend

@Tolly – this is one crazy story – I would have never imagined such a thing being possible. I really hope all goes well for this poor little girl… at least she definitely looks like a happy child.

Yes Evie, I am following up this story, lets hope all is well…

How operation will remove girl’s parasitic twin

By Sam Relph and Peter Foster in New Delhi
Last Updated: 5:52pm GMT 05/11/2007

An operation to give Lakshmi Tatma, an Indian girl born with four arms and four legs, a chance at normal life is expected to take 40 hours:

• The paediatric team will spend up to eight hours separating the parasitic twin’s tissue from Lakshmi, until the surgeon has cut through to Lakshmi’s spine from the front.

• The parasitic twin and Lakshmi each have one functioning kidney and one dead kidney. The team will attempt to transplant the parasitic twin’s healthy kidney into Lakshmi, however she could survive with a single healthy kidney.
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• Lakshmi’s genital system and bladder need to be moved from the left side of her body to a more centred position.

• The neurosurgical team will then come in to separate Lakshmi’s spine from her parasitical twin, which will take 6-8 hours.

• The most immediate danger is Lakshmi’s nervous system, which is “jumbled up”. A mistake could leave her paralysed. The team must cut some of the tissue surrounding her spinal cord to successfully separate the parasitic twin.

• The plastic surgery team will then come in to “close the flap”. At this stage the parasitic twin will finally be removed from Lakshmi.

• The orthopaedic surgeon must then close Lakshmi’s pelvic bones, which are widely separated. The procedure is described as closing an open book.

• An external fixater will be fitted to Lakshmi, which will apply compression to the pelvic bones and will be tightened each day for about three weeks until the bones are in the correct position.

• Finally, the plastic surgery team will come back to close all Lakshmi’s wounds. The procedure is likely to take up to 4 hours.

• Further operations may be required to correct Lakshmi club feet. She may also need reconstruction of her pelvic floor muscles.

First phase of surgery on Baby Lakshmi successful

Surgeons at Bangalore’s Sparsh Hospitals have successfully separated the spine of two-year-old Laksmi from her parasitic twin in the first stage of a long and complicated operation.

The team of 36 doctors, who are carried out the operation, claimed they have completed the ‘most critical’ part of the operation by separating the spinal cord that extended into Lakshmi’s headless twin.

The doctors are now set to separate the parasitic lower part of Lakshmi’s body. The long surgery, which had begun on Tuesday morning, went off without any complication, hospital director and orthopaedic surgeon Sharan Patil — who led the team — said. He described the condition of the baby as stable.

“Paediatric surgeons are now on with their job to separate the organs. Later, the orthopaedic surgeons will try to reconstruct the pelvic ring in the first stage of the operation,” Patil said.

Lakshmi, an ischiopagus twin, had two bodies joined at her pelvis. Only one of the twins had a head, while the other was a parasite. Two pairs of legs and arms were formed at either end of the two adjoining torsos, thus appearing as a child with eight limbs.

She was born into a poor family in a village in Araria district near the Bihar-Nepal border. The specialists at Sparsh Hospitals had brought the baby from a poor household in the remote Rampur village on Bihar-Nepal border.

Lakshmi had one kidney in her body and the other in the body of the twin. The spinal cord ran through the other torso and had two excretory passages.

“The greatest challenge before us is to remove the extraneous parts and move all the structures up into Lakshmi without causing any harm to her vital organs,” Dr Patil said.

“First when we saw her, we were really scared. She was born during Diwali, so everyone in the village said our child was Goddess Lakshmi incarnate because she had eight limbs. Everyone started worshipping her. We also worshipped her,” says Lakshmi’s father, Shambhu.

The baby’s mother Poonam, who married Shambu six years ago, had given birth to Lakshmi, her second child, in her mother’s home without any medical supervision. She did not receive any antenatal care too.