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8 Limbed Girl

Lakshmi Tatma was born joined to a ‘parasitic twin’ a rare condition known as isciopagus. Complications for Lakshmi were major such as her two spines are merged together; she had four kidneys, entangled nerves, two stomach cavities and two chest cavities. Also, she is incapable of standing up or walking because of the extra limbs. The head-less “twin” was joined to Lakshmi at the pelvic girdle and has its own spinal column. Without an operation, the little girl would never be able to crawl or walk and would be unlikely to live past her early teen years according to doctors. The four-armed, four-legged girl revered as a reincarnation of a Hindu goddess had successful surgery on November 6, 2007. The surgery, performed in Bangalore, India, took twenty-four hours and involved neurologists and structures were the girls and removing those of the undeveloped twin. The operation, at an estimated cost of six hundred and twenty five thousand dollars, was provided free by doctors at Sparsh Hospital.
This article definitely fits into the notion of anatomy because of the girl’s abnormal body structure. Just recently we studied about bone formation and the functions of different bones. One area on the chapter of bone is deformation. Lakshmi disease, isciopagus, was not covered in the chapter because of how rare it is.
Something that I knew about this topic is that one in every fifty thousand births has this birth defect. Other than that statistic I had no knowledge of this disease. Because this disease is so rare not much information is known to anyone.
What I’ve learned after reading this article is that Lakshmi was not just one person, but she had a twin that was fused to her at the pelvic during embryonic growth; I had just assumed that she had eight legs, four arms, and four legs. Also Lakshmi’s parents who had an expected medical bill of six hundred twenty five thousand dollars earned just one dollar a day.
While reading this article, I later found out, which I found...