Precarious & Critical

As the days passed last week, doctors at the University of Illinois' Neuropsychiatric Institute in Chicago were more & more amazed. Roger Brodie, one of the skull-joined Siamese twins separated the week before in a history-making operation (TIME, Dec. 29), was doing what appeared to be impossible, i.e., simply staying alive. Rodney Brodie was doing the improbable: getting no worse.

The doctors called Roger's condition "precarious." He was still in a deep coma, his brain numbed by scant circulation because the operation had left him without a sagittal vein to carry blood from the top of the brain back toward the heart. Roger had no life functions except the most elemental and automatic: breathing, digestion and elimination. Rodney, who got the sagittal vein which the twins had formerly shared, drifted in & out of sleep. Awake, Rodney showed the same powers of observation and speech as before the operation, but was still groggy from the ordeal. His condition was "critical."

In their separate cribs, set in corners so that they faced foot to foot, each of the twins had a special-duty nurse watching over him the clock around. Also present, almost constantly, was Pediatrician Herbert J. Grossman, waiting to flag the surgeons when the time came to operate again. For the doctors were convinced that neither twin could get much better without a top to his brainpan (now closed lightly with plastic, metal foil and bandage). The longer the brain cavities remained unsealed, the greater the danger of a fatal infection. So far. neither of the babies was strong enough to face more surgery.

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