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An Indian girl born with four arms and four legs is reportedly responding well to the early stages of an extensive surgery.
According to the news website ibnlive.com, surgeons at Bangalore's Sparsh Hospital have successfully separated the spine of two-year-old Laksmi from her parasitic twin in the first stage of a long and complicated operation.
Lakshmi, an ischiopagus twin, had two bodies joined at her pelvis. Only one of the twins had a head, while the other was a parasite. Two pairs of legs and arms were formed at either end of the two adjoining torsos, thus appearing as a child with eight limbs.
The girl's twin stopped developing in their mother's womb. As the surviving foetus, Lakshmi absorbed the limbs, kidneys and other body parts of the undeveloped foetus, Associated Press (AP) reported.
"A team of neurosurgeons have separated the fused spines, and will try next to remove the extra limbs, then the rest of her parasitic twin," said Dr Sharan Patil, the orthopaedic surgeon heading the operation told AP.
The surgery, which began early Tuesday local time, involves around 30 doctors and could stretch on for 40 hours.
"The child has been responding very well and it is a big team effort involving a lot of skilled surgeons who will be putting their heart and soul into solving the problem of Lakshmi," Dr Patil said.
Lakshmi was born into a poor family in a village in Araria district near the Bihar-Nepal border.
The hospital's foundation is paying for the surgeries because her family could not afford the medical bills, AP reported.
Lakshmi is named after the four-armed Hindu goddess of wealth, and some in her poor village in the north Indian state of Bihar revere the little girl.
"Everybody considers her a goddess at our village," Lakshmi's father, Shambu, told AP.
He said the family feared people would try to make money from her and, after an unsuccessful attempt by a circus to buy her, they had kept her in hiding.
