Indian girl with 4 arms and 4 legs stable

Indian girl with 4 arms and 4 legs stable
07/ 11/ 2007

BANGALORE, India - A two-year-old girl who was born with four arms and four legs left a hospital in southern India on Saturday little more than a month after a difficult 27-hour operation to remove her extra limbs, doctors said on Wednesday.



The illiterate villagers first considered her as an incarnation of Hindu Goddess Laxmi but after some time they realised that she was not well and needed medical help.

Lakshmi Tatma is a two-year-old girl named after the Hindu goddess of wealth who has four arms. She was believed to have been "sent from God" when she was born to a poor rural family in the Indian state of Bihar.

The £100,000 operation has differently skilled teams of more than 30 surgeons to work in eight-hour shifts to separate Lakshmi's spinal column and kidney from that of her twin.

After attempting to transplant the shared kidney wholly into Lakshmi's body, another team of surgeons will gradually close up her pelvic girdle while re-orientating her bladder and genital systems. Plastic surgeons will then graft skin to cover her wounds while an "external fixator" will be attached to close her pelvis gradually over a three-week period.

"Lakshmi is doing fine and her condition is stable," the Hindustan Times quoted the chief coordinator of the Sparsh Hospital in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, Dr. Mamata Patil, as saying.

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