Bringing cheers to her parents and the team of doctors, two-year-old Lakshmi moved her toes and hands on Thursday, a day after she was separated from a parasitic conjoined twin in a marathon surgery at a private hospital here.“Lakshmi has moved her toes and hands for the first time and opened her eyes briefly,” Dr Sharan Patil who led the team of surgeons here. “She is progressing in the right direction. We have had no setbacks so far,” he said.The Sparsh Hospital, a part of the Narayan Health City, which had performed the complex and one of the rare surgeries free of cost has created a separate ICU for the child and drafted a medical team exclusively to monitor her health condition round-the-clock. The hospital has borne the entire cost of the operation which was roughly estimated to be around Rs 30 lakh, Dr Patil said. “Lakshmi is safe. All her parameters are okay. We had a good night and nothing untoward happened,” Patil said. Lakshmi has been coping up with ventilators well and was able to withstand the complicated surgical procedure that lasted for 27 hours, he said. The doctors have decided to slowly decrease the amount of sedatives being administered to Lakshmi and the girl was expected to be on ventilators for at least the next 24 hours, he said. Patil hoped that Lakshmi will show steady progress.Sounding a word of caution, Dr Patil said, “Despite the success of the operation, we are still a little away from success. We will have to wait and watch.”Following the successful surgery, the hospital has been receiving queries from different parts of the world for conducting similar surgeries, he said. “We have been getting several e-mails. But right now our priority is Lakshmi. We have to wait till the end of the story before we take others,” Dr Patil said.
