The only woman in the world who knows how the Siamese twin Jodie will feel has spoken of her joy at being given the chance of life in a separation operation that killed her sister.
Victoria Tieaskie is now 30, married and training to be a children’s nurse so that she can share her own fighting spirit with other children defying adversity.
She has survived 40 big surgical operations through her childhood to become a happy, healthy adult who can walk normally and might be able to become a mother.
Mrs Tieaskie was joined to her sister at the pelvic area in almost exactly the same way in which Jodie is now attached to Mary at St Mary’s Hospital, Manchester.
When Victoria and her sister were born in 1969, senior doctors at a maternity hospital said that nature should prevail and "it" — the twins — must be allowed to die. A young trainee doctor helped to get the sisters to a team of specialists in another city, who performed the world’s seventh operation to separate this kind of conjoined twins.
She is believed to be the oldest survivor of such surgery and has decided to break her long silence to send a message of hope to Jodie and Mary’s parents.
"I am very grateful that I was given the chance," Mrs Tieaskie said. "Right now I have scars, but I am not handicapped in any way. I never felt I was saved at my twin’s expense. She wouldn’t have survived anyway. I know if she was supposed to have lived, she would have. It just wasn’t meant to be."
The Maltese parents of Mary and Jodie have given up their court battle to stop the separation and are awaiting the surgery, which will kill Mary, in the next two months.
Victoria’s mother, who was only 18, had no idea she was expecting twins when her daughters were born at the St John Medical Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on December 22, 1969.
"The doctor didn’t know what to call us because he had never seen anything like that before," Mrs Tieaskie said. "He never called us babies. He never called us girls."
The children were left to die, but a 28-year-old student doctor, David Sward, saw them and became curious. He checked the hospital library and found an article by an expert on Siamese twins who worked in Oklahoma City, only 100 miles away.
Dr Sward, now working in Arkansas, recalled: "What I did was, first of all, probably not ethical and, perhaps, illegal." With a couple of doctors from another hospital, he secretly did X-rays and tests on the twins, without getting permission from the obstetricians or paediatricians. "We were giving this kid sugarwater and a little nourishment and penicillin to keep it from getting infected long enough until something could be done."
Dr Sward persuaded the nurses in the Tulsa hospital to arrange a transfer to the Children’s Hospital in Oklahoma City. The twins were just two days old. Like Mary, Victoria’s twin, Veronica, had a malformed head and never breathed. She could live only while attached to her sister.
The doctors in Oklahoma City wanted to wait two months to separate the girls, but after two weeks Victoria suffered a heart attack from the strain of keeping her sister alive. The operation was performed as an emergency. Mrs Tieaskie said: "She was breathing off me. After they separated us, she immediately died."
Twice, when she was three months and 16 months old, surgeons broke her badly-bowed legs to straighten them. She had to be put into a whole-body brace to prevent her moving her legs. She wore special shoes for clubbed feet until corrective surgery cured them. Victoria had few problems at school: "There was a little bit of teasing because I had to wear diapers for so long. As time went on, my body learnt to adapt.
"Right now I have two bladders because I still have hers. I’m flat-footed but that’s OK. I have never had any psychological problem. I think it has made me tougher."
Mrs Tieaskie, a dialysis worker in Oklahoma City, has the chance of becoming a mother using her sister-in-law as a surrogate. She produces eggs, although she would be unable to carry a child herself.
She is passionate that Jodie should be separated from Mary. "It is not murder. It’s saving a child who has fought this long to survive."
Victoria’s mother, Debbie Purinton, said: "After she was born, they took her right away and told me ‘it’ — I think they called her ‘it’ — would be dead by the morning. They put her in a corner, without any fluid, to die."
Victoria’s father, who was also extremely young, found the pressure intolerable. Mrs Purinton, whose husband adopted Victoria, said: "Her biological father left when she was five and signed away parental rights. He had difficulty coping. We just dealt with it.
"To look at her from the outside, you wouldn’t know she had this going on. She is a roadmap of scars. Most are round the hip and stomach and back. Her biggest complaint is she doesn’t have a belly button. It went with the other baby.
"It really wasn’t ever thought that we were sacrificing one to save the other because there was never any chance of her twin living anyway. You can’t really think of it in terms of sacrificing one for the other. If not, you are sacrificing both. You are not even giving one the option."
