Former Conjoined Twins Doing Well

Two-year-old twin boys from Egypt who had been joined at the head spent their first night apart after 34-hour separation surgery and a doctor said Monday they were "in good shape."

The surgery to separate little Ahmed and Mohamed Ibrahim began Saturday morning at Children's Medical Center in Dallas and ended late Sunday afternoon. They remained in critical but stable condition early Monday.

"They are critical because of the life support systems that they're on, but they are stable," Dr. James Thomas told CBS News Early Show co-anchor René Syler. "They've had a very good night.

"But I'm afraid to speak too positively because you don't want to jinx it," he added.

He said their blood pressure was stable and kidney function "perfect."

"There are risks of brain swelling in this immediate postoperative phase," Thomas said. "They're in a drug induced coma at this point to protect their brains from swelling and on respirators and requiring medication for blood pressure support but responding well to the therapy."

Doctors stressed there were still concerns: the possibility of stroke, infection and how the wounds will heal, and long-term questions about brain damage from the surgery.

The conjoined twins, who had an intricate connection of blood vessels but separate brains, were physically separated about 26 hours after they entered the operating room. Doctors then went to work covering the head wounds.

The boys' father, Ibrahim Mohammed Ibrahim, fainted when he heard the operation was over.

"At one point when someone came up and said, 'you have two boys,' the father jumped to my neck and he hugged me and he fainted and I cared for him," said Dr. Nasser Abdel Al, who was with the family for the marathon operation. He is head of neonatal surgery at a Cairo hospital where the twins were taken shortly after their birth.

"He told me that he never dreamt of such a moment," said Abdel Al. He added that Ibrahim's wife, Sabah Abu el-Wafa, "was crying like everybody else."

The intricate operation had been in the planning stages for months. The surgery team used a specially made operating table that let doctors swivel the boys bodies for easy access to the front and back of their heads.

The boys will spend the postoperative phase at Children's until they are stable. Then they will be moved back to North Texas Hospital for Children at Medical City in Dallas, where they were cared for before arriving at Children's on Thursday.

They will need additional reconstructive surgery in coming years.

What are the chances of normal lives for them?

"I've been asked this question several times and the honest answer is we do not know what their prognosis is," said Thomas. "It's almost a unique case and there is no way to judge the possibilities for their future based on past experience."

The boys were born on June 2, 2001, by Caesarean section.

The Dallas-based World Craniofacial Foundation, a nonprofit group that helps children with deformities of the head and face, arranged to bring the boys to Dallas in June 2002 for an evaluation.

In the boys' hometown of el-Homr, some 400 miles south of Cairo, villagers have been praying in town mosques for the twins "to return safely," said Mohammed Ibrahim, 65, the twins' grandfather.

As conjoined twins, Mohamed and Ahmed smiled and giggled, babbled in English and Arabic and tried to move around any way they could. But experts had said they were getting behind in their development, compared with other children their age, because they were unable to explore their world.

When doctors concluded that a separation surgery was possible, the risks were explained to the parents. The boys' father told the doctors to go ahead.

"If they're left this way, they're not going to be normal," Ibrahim said through a translator earlier this year.