Girl born with 8 limbs.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=3831220&page=1

(warning: picture in link might disturb)

By NICK SCHIFRIN
NEW DELHI, India, Nov. 7, 2007
Font Size

E-mail
Print
Share

In the desperately poor corner of Bihar, India, she was a miracle.

Tiny Lakshmi Tatma was born two years ago with four arms and four legs. The local population considered her the manifestation of a goddess. Her parents named her after the four-armed Hindu goddess of wealth.

A local circus even tried to buy her, but her parents chose health over fame and asked a team of doctors to remove her extra limbs. The surgery, conducted in Bangalore, ended successfully this afternoon.

"The child has withstood the procedure in an excellent manner," Dr. Sharan Patil, the team leader who planned the surgery for more than a month, told reporters outside the Sparsh Hospital. "This girl can now lead as good a life as anyone else."

It took more than 30 surgeons 27 hours to not only remove two of Lakshmi's arms and two of her legs but also to rebuild much of her body and save her organs. They say the chances of death were as high as 25 percent.

The cost of such a complex procedure would have been $625,000, far too great for the Lakshmi's family to afford. The hospital's foundation paid.

"We are very grateful to all the doctors for seeing our plight and deciding to help us," Tatma's father, Shambhu, told The Associated Press.

The doctors "worked relentlessly through the night to make the operation successful," Patil said, adding there had been "no setback at any stage of the surgery."

Half a Twin

Lakshmi is essentially one half of a conjoined twin without a living sibling. Her condition is called ischiopagus. In the womb, a "parasitic twin" stopped developing, but Lakshmi absorbed its arms and legs, its kidneys, its stomach and chest cavities as well as a series of nerves.

The surgery removed the extra body parts and unfused Lakshmi's spine from her twin's. To rebuild her pelvis, surgeons used tissue from the twin. And to save her kidney, doctors said, they had to remove it from the "parasitic abdomen" and move it into Lakshmi's own abdomen. She may still need more surgeries.

Conjoined twins occur in about one in every 200,000 births, and their survival rate can be as low as 5 percent.

OMG... disturbing indeed.

I wish I had 8 fully-developed limbs so I can multi-task better. It would be great to hold a water bottle, a book, a backpack, the bus rails, and my mp3 player all at the same time. I also want four legs so I can run better and faster.

I'm imagining myself as some sort of organic Dr. Octopus.

It's sad, though. I mean, that was her twin. Freaky.

Oh yes, I completely agree with you on that part. Her twin died and merged into her body. That's really scary and I hope they can rebuild her so she can live a normal life.

I think the article said (and I'm too lazy to double check) that they had managed to safely remove the extra four limbs and that she should be able to walk someday, which is awesome.

It's just so crazy to think that our genes can make someone that looks so alien, yet is human.

Wow..I find it more incredible and admirable that people who go through similar situations hold steadfast and continue living life as best they can.

now if only she was blue

^LOL