Peru’s ‘Miracle Baby’ Stable After Surgery
Published: June 2, 2005
Thirteen-month-old Milagros Cerron was stable and awake 15 hours after doctors separated her fused legs in only the second such successful operation on record to correct “mermaid syndrome,” her doctors said.
The lead physician said Cerron’s medical team believed she could be walking within two years but cautioned the bright-eyed girl will need years of surgery to reconstruct her internal organs.
“In accordance with the anatomic findings that we have encountered, it is possible that she will walk,” Dr. Luis Rubio told reporters late Wednesday. “There is extraordinary capillary flow. The reflexes are now independently evident in each foot.”
The girl - whose name means “miracles” - was born with her legs fused together from her thighs to her ankles inside a seamless sack of skin and fat.
Rubio said Tiffany Yorks, a 16-year-old American girl with the same condition, was the only other known case of surgical correction of the congenital defect, which occurs in one out of every 70,000 births and is almost always fatal within seven days.
He said there is a third person living somewhere in Asia with the deformity, also known as “sirenomelia,” but that details about the person’s identity and circumstances were sketchy.
In Milagros’ case, doctors had planned to begin repairing the birth defect only up to the child’s knees, but the 4 hour surgery before dawn Wednesday exceeded the medical team’s expectations.
The first sign the surgery was going well came 30 minutes into the procedure, when Rubio announced that they could cut past a major artery that had connected both legs without doing a complicated bypass.
Doctors separated Milagros’ fused heels, and for a little more than an hour continued upward, slowly separating the legs toward the child’s groin.
Just before 3 a.m. Wednesday, Rubio held up the girl’s legs in a V-shape, displaying the line of stitches extending up from her heels to her inner thighs.
He called the surgery a “true success.”
The doctors finished the surgery by wrapping each of Milagros’ legs with acrylic splints in heavy sheaths of cotton and gauze and then trussed both legs together in a final binding layer of bandages.
Fifteen hours after the surgery, Rubio told reporters the child’s vital signs were stable. He said she was awake and taking liquids but would remain in intensive care for three days.
Arauco, stood off to the side, relaxed and smiling.
“She is beautiful, beautiful as always,” she said of her daughter. “She’s doing very well. She’s active, like always. She recognizes me. She was crying, but when I stroked her lovingly, she became very tranquil. She’s really good.”
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