ANADARKO, Okla. – After months of preparation and prayer by family members and doctors, the first conjoined Native American twins, Preslee Faith and Kylee Hope Wells, underwent a successful separation surgery at 12:14 p.m. Jan. 19 at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center in Oklahoma City. At press time, the twins are in differing stages of recovery, with Kylee being in critical condition, and Preslee being in the more improved serious condition.
“It was a relief and a little bit weird all at the same time,” said their mother, Stevie Stewart, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. Stewart said the doctors of OU Medical Center have not given her a time frame of when the twins would be well enough to return with her and their father, Kyle Wells, to Calumet, Okla.
“Their wounds aren’t healed up enough for me to hold them yet,” said Stewart, but she said the wounds from the separation surgery would be healed in one month.
Allen Poston, public relations director for The Children’s Hospital at OU Medical Center, has kept an online blog of the Wells twins’ progress beginning with the time before the surgery, where he made continual updates from his Blackberry, writing about the large amount of family and friends waiting with Stewart and Wells.
At 11:27 a.m. Jan. 19, Poston wrote “Sometimes you can forget about the preciousness of life. … I’m standing here in the operating room looking at the exposed beating heart of Preslee Wells.” At 12:14 p.m., Poston wrote in large caps “SEPARATE,” indicating earlier in the blog that the most difficult part of this particular surgery would be the separation of the livers. Poston also wrote that prior planning and practice for the surgical procedure was rehearsed by OU medical staff and attending physicians, which numbered 15 by Poston’s count.
According to Poston’s blog, the twins will need a follow-up surgery in another year.
Community support for the Wells twins continues to be strong throughout Oklahoma. Stewart, an employee of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Concho, Okla., said the tribes recently held a luncheon at the tribes’ café, where proceeds of the event went toward the Wells twins.
On Tuesday, Feb. 10, there will be two events for the twins. The first of these will be a blood drive to help the twins with future surgeries or emergencies, to be held from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. in the Riverside Indian School Band Room in Anadarko, Okla. The second event will be a benefit dinner to be held in Calumet before the high school basketball game.
“Thanks for all of the support and prayers,” Stewart says to all who have supported her, her children and her other family members. “They still need the prayers.”