iamese Twins, more properly known as Conjoined Twins, are a fascinating topic to me.  I don't want to be one, or want to own one, and I find pictures of them interesting, but detailed descriptions of how they live their lives are what really interest me.  What's it like to be attached to another person every minute of your life?  To share colds, to get drunk if your twin has too much wine, to be your own person, with your own identity, while you're stuck to another person with their own agenda?  How do you date, masturbate, have sex, go to the bathroom, pick your nose, fart, fit into a car or a normal chair, buy clothing, and all of the other minor inconveniences of life that we single-bodied organisms take for granted.

If you share a leg or an arm, who gets to control it?  Do you both have control over it, but one of you is stronger with it?  How do you decide who gets to do what on a given day, if you have different desires?  The whole thing can't be much of a picnic, given how virtually all of them seem to choose to undergo very dangerous and frequently fatal surgery to try and get unhooked from each other.

As I said, the whole thing fascinates me.  And with articles on conjoined twins appearing more and more often in the media (for no reason I can discern), there have been a lot of opportunities to write about them lately.

February 10, 2004

After the recent rash of human conjoined twin stories, today we've got a much cuter one.  About tortoises.

MESA, Ariz. - A pair of conjoined tortoises were separated Sunday at a Tempe animal hospital in what is believed to be the first surgery of its kind in Arizona.

"I think it was a great success," said Sharon Ehasz, 24, who owns the African leopard tortoises with her husband, Bobby Ehasz. "I think they're going to be a little confused — the world as they knew it is going to be somewhat tilted."

Peanut Butter and Jelly — so named because "you can't have one without the other," Ehasz said — were joined at the side of the belly near the tail end, slightly offset in a heart-shaped configuration.

No pictures, apparently.  The funny part is next:

The two tortoises spent about half of their lives with one on its back, the other trying to kick itself over. Bobby Ehasz, 29, said he and his wife routinely flipped over the tortoises, carefully logging the time one stayed on its back while the other was upright.

Now where is the footage of that on one of those American's Funniest Animal Home Video shows?

Anyway, did the one on top never realize that it was stuck to another turtle, and that no matter how much it kicked it would not be turning back over until the giant hand of god came along and flipped it back? Or could they turn over sometimes, if they got a good lurch and some leverage off the side of the tank?

That sort of thing would be really bizarre in the wild, since obviously the one on top would eventually starve to death, if it couldn't eat while upside down.  And then it would die and kill the other one as their shared rotting flesh suppurated.  Or something.  What happens to one when the other dies is fascinating, when it comes to conjoined twins. In the most famous US case, that of Eng and Chang Bunker (who were born in Siam and became very famous in America, apparently inadvertently coining the "Siamese twins" term) Chang woke up one day to find Eng dead, and then died himself a few hours later.  The cause of death?  Blood loss.  His heart kept pumping blood, but most of it went into his brother's body while no heart was pumping there to send it back over.

Which makes you wonder, could conjoined twins live on if one died, and they took the shared organs out of the dead one and put the into the living one?  How do you separate out the blood vessels and such?  What if one were shot and went into a coma, while the other one was okay, but they couldn't wake up the comatose one.  Would the awake one carry his/her twin around on a stretcher or something? How could you live with this unconscious body stuck to you at all times?

I'd say that would be a good plot for a movie, but the Farrelly Brothers recently went there, with pretty lackluster results.  Of course they were going from the comedy angle, rather than the horrific one that I'd choose.

February 9, 2004

The Rotten.com-esque two-headed baby girl died during surgery to try and remove her second head.  I glanced at the news articles and photos, but didn't read them too closely, or blog about it, since it was just too freaky. For some reason, there's yet another weirdly-conjoined twin in the news about every other week now, and we've moved far beyond the old days of "joined at the hip" or "sharing a liver" connections.  Now every kid has half their unborn, undeveloped brother's head in their left ass cheek, or they share a spinal cord, or something else downright freakish.

This girl was a sort of half-ogre, with another human head joined to hers, with part of a brain, but they were joined in about the least attractive way possible; at the top of the skull, facing in opposite directions.  So you've got the one normal human child, with about half the head and face of another person on top of her head, upside down, facing in the other direction.  I don't know if it was potentially fatal to her to just leave it alone, or if it would have caused her to have a brain hemorrhage or it would have died and she'd have gotten necrosis or what, but I don't think anyone could envision her living a normal life with that thing on top of her skull. At least not unless really big hats suddenly came back into style.  Plus they were probably afraid that it would come to life and start staring at other people or flapping its toothless mouth or something.

In an effort to be more thought-provoking and less cheap shotting, take a look at that picture.  I'm pretty inured to grossness, and yet I find it uncomfortable to look at, to the point that I've cropped and reduced it in size quite a bit from even the version on Yahoo. Maybe it's just me, but this picture creeps me out and I'd rather not see it, or other medical disaster photos.  Yet this, and bloody photos of war dead, bomb casualties, murder victims, etc are considered perfectly fine to post in the newspaper, magazines, or on major Internet news sites.  All places you can never find a photo of a naked human body, or even the shapely, interesting-ornamented boobie of a formerly popular female pop vocalist.

Can anyone explain why?  What sort of person would rather see this, or have their children see this, than the partially-nude breast of an attractive female? Why are people so fucked up about sexuality, or even just minor partial nudity in the US?  It disturbs and depresses me.

Thinking about it more seriously, imagine what life will be like?  There isn't any news item about the kid(s) yet, how healthy they are, if there is really one body and 2 heads, how many legs and arms, if there are two spines all overlapping and causing problems, etc. Just imagine if the spines merge and the kid can walk, move normally, etc.  I'm assuming it's really one body and two heads, and is functional.

On January 17, 1874, Eng was awakened in the middle of the night by a strange sensation. Looking towards his brother, Eng quickly realized that Chang had died. Eng called for his son William, who ran through the house shouting "Uncle Chang is dead!" Within hours, Eng was dead, too. Several weeks later, the bodies were brought to Philadelphia by a commission appointed by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. An autopsy was performed by Drs. Harrison Allen and William H. Pancoast at the Mütter Museum. It was determined that Chang had died of a cerebral clot. It was unclear, however, why Eng had died. Some physicians suggested that he died of fright. Today, it is thought that Eng bled to death, as the blood pooled in his dead brother's body.

Because of the severe nature of their connection, the Tocci brothers never learned to walk without assistance. As in the case of some conjoined twins, each boy controlled only one leg, and they never were able to coordinate their movements. They were able to write (one was left-handed, the other right-handed) and each had artistic talents. After twenty difficult years touring, the twins retired to a secluded home near Venice, Italy. They married sisters and lived another forty-three years in seclusion.

Masha and Dasha are bound to each other permanently. They each have 2 arms, but they share 3 legs, two perfectly good ones and a vestigial third leg. They were born January 4, 1950 in Moscow. As a result of their degree of fusion, they share some internal organs, though not all. Their pelvic bones join and their spines meet at the coccyx. Their circulatory system is interconnected, though their nervous systems are not. Since their spinal cords do not connect, their senses of touch are totally distinct. They become ill separately and fall asleep separately. They each have their own stomach and separate upper intestines, which join to form a single lower intestine and rectum. They have four kidneys, one bladder and a single set of reproductive organs. There is no physiological reason why they could not bear children.

I don't really want to interview or meet twins/a twin, but I would like to read some more of the nitty gritty info, beyond what the relatively superficial website articles I've seen in the last hour of searching has shown me.

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