JERUSALEM: Indian-Origin Neurosurgeon Helps Save Israeli Twins Conjoined At The Head: Report

JERUSALEM: A world-renowned Indian-origin
pediatric neurosurgeon in the UK has helped a group of Israeli doctors to
successfully operate on a pair of twins conjoined at the head, with the babies
now likely to lead normal lives, a media report said.

This is
for the first time that Dr. Noor Ul Owase Jeelani, who was born in Kashmir and
works at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital, agreed to carry out such a
surgery outside the UK when contacted by doctors at Israel’s Soroka hospital,
according to a report in The Times of Israel (TOI).

He and
his colleague, Professor David Dunway, are globally seen as experts on such
cases.

Mr
Jeelani said, “from a doctor’s point of view, we’re all one” and that medicine
transcends all divisions.

“He
said that the fact that a Kashmir-born Muslim doctor scrubbed up alongside an
Israeli team to help a Jewish family was a reminder of the universal nature of
medicine,” the report quoted him as saying.

“It was a
fantastic family that we helped,” Mr Jeelani said, adding, as I’ve said all my
life, all children are the same, whatever colour or religion”.

“The
distinctions are man-made. A child is a child. From a doctor’s point of view,
we’re all one,” he emphasised.

The
doctor found the family’s delight at the success of the operation “deeply
moving”.

“There
was this very special moment when the parents were just over the moon. I have
never in my life seen a person smile, cry, be happy, and be relieved at the
same time. The mother simply couldn’t believe it, we had to pull up a chair to
help her to calm down,” Mr Jeelani told the news portal.

Mr
Jeelani is said to have also worked for months on the surgery of the Israeli
twins.

“We’ve
been involved right from the start, talking to the team in Israel and planning
it with them over a period of six months,” he said.

“This
latest surgery fulfills a key objective of our charity, namely, to empower
local teams abroad to undertake this complex work, successfully utilising our
experience, knowledge, and skills gained over the past 15 years with our
previous four sets of twins,” the neurosurgeon stressed.

It is
also a major achievement for the medical team at Israel’s Soroka hospital that
managed this complex operation despite having never performed such a surgery.

It
involved complicated on-the-spot decisions regarding which blood vessel to give
to which twin, and assessing in real-time the impact that immediate decisions
were having on the functioning of the brains, the report said.

Mr
Jeelani has performed four other such surgeries on twins who were conjoined at
the head with fused skulls, intertwined brains, and shared blood vessels.

His
involvement with conjoined twins started in 2017 when a neurosurgeon from
Peshawar, Pakistan, asked him to operate on identical conjoined twins, Safa and
Marwa, born three months earlier to a woman from rural northern Pakistan.

He raised
the money for the surgery from a Pakistani oil trader called Murtaza Lakhani
and, with Dunaway, successfully performed the operation after hundreds of hours
of preparation.