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Ex-conjoined twins leave hospital on birthday eve

Mon Dec 21, 2009 1:13 AM EST

world-news, australia, as, twins, conjoined

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<p>In this photo provided by the Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne is formerly conjoined twin Krishna just before she and her sister, Trishna, leave the hospital five weeks after their separation surgery and just in time to celebrate their third birthday in Melbourne on Monday, Dec. 21, 2009. The girls had been joined at the top of their heads and shared brain tissue and blood vessels before their separation in a 30-hour operation Nov. 17. (AP Photo/The Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne, Bert Di Paolo) </p>

In this photo provided by the Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne is formerly conjoined twin Krishna just before she and her sister, Trishna, leave the hospital five weeks after their separation surgery and just in time to celebrate their third birthday in Melbourne on Monday, Dec. 21, 2009. The girls had been joined at the top of their heads and shared brain tissue and blood vessels before their separation in a 30-hour operation Nov. 17. (AP Photo/The Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne, Bert Di Paolo)

MELBOURNE — Formerly conjoined twin sisters Trishna and Krishna were discharged from an Australian hospital Monday, five weeks after their separation surgery and just in time to celebrate their third birthday.

Doctors said the Bangladeshi-born girls had made amazing progress since the Nov. 17 surgery and were already using walkers to move around the hospital. The girls had been joined at the top of their heads and shared brain tissue and blood vessels before their separation in a 30-hour operation.

"I look forward to seeing them live a long and happy life; that's my wish for them," neurosurgeon Wirginia Maixner said in a statement released by the Royal Children's Hospital.

They will spend their birthday on Tuesday at home in Melbourne with their legal guardian, Moira Kelly.

The girls will continue to receive care as outpatients at the hospital.

In the statement, Kelly expressed her gratitude to the doctors and staff.

"They have given these two little girls a new life. I can't wait to take them home," she said.

Lovely Mollick, the girls' birth mother, was overjoyed upon learning the girls had been discharged.

"I can't express how I am feeling," Mollick told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from her home in Khulna district, 85 miles (140 kilometers) southwest of the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka.

"I pray for them; may God bless them," she said through tears. "Happy birthday."

An aid worker first saw Trishna and Krishna in an orphanage in Dhaka when they were a month old. Mollick, 23, had handed them over to an orphanage because she and her husband were unable to care for their special needs.

The aid worker contacted the Children First Foundation, which brought the girls to Australia for the operation.