Saturday 6 August 2022 12:13 AM The first conjoined twins to be separated in the UK reveal they share a close ... trends now

They each hope to marry one day, but neither is rushing to tie the knot. Twins Hassan and Hussein Salih both worry how life with two wives would turn out, given that they share such a deep emotional bond.

For the brothers are not just twins but boys who spent the first seven months of their lives with their bodies fused together from chest to hip.

They made medical history in April 1987 when they became the first conjoined twins in Britain to be successfully separated. But while they have been physically split up, they remain, metaphorically, joined at the hip.

Now 35, not only do they sleep in the same bedroom, but watch the same movies and devotedly nurse each other after the hospital surgeries which continue to dog their lives.

‘We are a package. We come as a pair,’ admits Hassan with a grin. ‘My wife will have to like Hussein. His wife will have to like me.’

Following the pioneering operation at London’s renowned Great Ormond Street Hospital, the Salih brothers from Hounslow were pictured cradled in the surgeon’s arms, alike as two peas in a pod, their dark eyes peering beadily at the photographer.

These images turned them into poster boys for what used to be called Siamese twins.

This week, the Mail went to meet the remarkable duo at their home near Heathrow airport following the success of another astonishing operation on conjoined twins. 

This one took place on the other side of the world to separate three-year-old Brazilian brothers Bernardo and Arthur Lima.

Joined at the head, they were parted during a marathon 27-hour procedure involving surgeons in Britain and Rio de Janeiro, who wore headsets.

They operated together in the same ‘virtual-reality room’, directed by paediatric neurosurgeon Noor ul Owase Jeelani, also from Great Ormond Street Hospital. Mr Jeelani said he was absolutely shattered after the operation, during which he took only four 15-minute breaks for food and water.

He added that, as with all conjoined twins after separation, the toddlers’ blood pressure and heart rates went ‘through the roof’.

He could offer no medical explanation for this phenomenon, and it is widely assumed that it was the result of a form of ‘separation anxiety’. It was only after the boys were reunited four days later, lying close together and holding hands, that their vital signs returned to normal.

This incredible emotional bond does not surprise the Salih twins one bit. At their family’s terrace house this week, they both said they understood exactly why the Brazilian toddlers reacted in the way they did.

‘We yearn to be able to live apart, but are still not ready to be apart even though we are grown-up,’ explains Hassan.

‘The day one of us has surgery, the other feels the pain in the same part of the body where the operation has taken place.’ The twins have had 20 or more surgeries, and many smaller procedures, in the years since they were separated, and only last week Hassan was in hospital for four days undergoing yet another operation.

And, as usual, Hussein shared the trauma of the procedure. ‘I lost sleep,’ he says. ‘It was a real, physical pain.’

He adds: ‘Hassan came home and only then did I feel complete again. It was not a Hollywood moment. But I felt calm. We just watched TV in our room. We were in our single beds. We were together.’

In the days since, Hussein has nursed Hassan in the same way his twin cares for him when he has been in hospital.

It has been like this for as long as they can remember. Aged 11 or 12, Hussein required surgery for a protruding bone near his heart, a legacy of the delicate but extensive operation to separate them.

‘I remember feeling pain here when he was in surgery,’ says Hassan, pointing to his chest.

They admit to feeling the same emotions, too. When one is miserable, the other invariably is as well. When one is happy, they normally both are.

It’s an unbreakable bond that dates back to when they were born — or even earlier.

They shared a liver, bodily fluids and a deformed third leg. Their kidneys were cross-wired and interconnected. You couldn’t see where one’s organs began and the other’s ended.

For 16 months — nine in the womb, and seven after birth — they lay physically joined.

The operation to separate them, rewire their insides and surgically remove the deformed third leg was approached with trepidation by pioneering surgeon Professor Lewis Spitz, who was renowned for separating conjoined twins.

Hassan, the weaker of the two, who is still a little shorter than his twin, was expected to die during or shortly after the complex 16-hour operation. Professor Spitz and his team put his chance of survival as low as 20 per cent.

Such pessimism is understandable because the prognosis for conjoined babies was not good in the 1980s. Even today, many are stillborn or die within a few days of birth. Seven-and-a-half per cent go on to live into adulthood and, of those who are separated, only 60 per cent survive the surgery. But, against the odds, Hassan survived.

The Salih twins’ backstory is a poignant one. It starts in 1986 in Sudan with a birth that defies belief.

During the twins’ childhood, their mother, Fayza, recounted the story of their origins every bedtime to remind the boys how lucky they were to be alive.

Indeed, she still reminds them of it now they are adults, say Hassan and Hussein, who clearly dote on her.

Fayza, now in her 60s, lived with her husband, Mohammed, in Kosti, a town on the White Nile, some 165 miles south of Sudan’s capital Khartoum.

The couple, both school teachers, had four children — all born healthy and naturally — when Fayza became pregnant for the fifth time. There were no ultrasound scans to be had in Kosti back then, so Fayza had no inkling that she was carrying twins, let alone conjoined ones.

In the eighth month of her

read more from dailymail.....