They Can Sleep, Cry and Become Ill Separately

In these pictures, taken when the twins were a year old, their third leg is at the top, on the far side of their body.  It has a cleft foot with eight toes.  Half of it is Masha's, half Dasha's.  Masha can feel pain in her half of the leg, but not in Dasha's - and vica versa.  In the top picture, as a pediatrician presses on Dasha's side of the foot, Dasha cries out while Masha feels nothing.  In the bottom picture Masha cries when the other side of the foot is tickled.  The X-ray at bottom was taken when the girls were babies.  A superimposed drawing shows how Masha's and Dasha's interal organs and bones are connected.  Their pelvic bones join and their spines meet at the concyx.  Their circulatory system is interconnected: if one were bitten by a poisonous snake, the venom would quickly spread to both.  Although their spines connect, their spinal cords do not.

Hence their nervous systems - e.g., sense of touch - totally distinct.  They become ill separately, fall asleep separately.  The have two stomachs (visible in drawing), and separate upper intestines which join into a single lower intestine and rectum.  They have four kidneys - but only one bladder, and they don't always agree on when to urinate; sometimes one twin wants to and the doesn't, Soviet doctors say there is no physiological reason why Masha and Dasha could not become a mother; they have a common reproductive system.

The Girls were five years old before they learned to walk.  Their left leg is controlled by Dasha and their right leg by Masha, and they had to do special exercises to learn how to coordinate.  But after a protracted struggle they learned to move together quite well.  Now they can ride a bicycle, dance, go up and down stairs and even climb a ladder.  but their personalities are entirely different, although they have identical genes and share the same environment as fully as any two human beings ever can.  Dasha - the one on the right is quick, bright and serious.  She loves to read.  She is also more temperamental and usually wins a sisterly argument.  Masha has always been slower.  "She is a light-minded chatterbox," say Professor Anokhin, "and already flirts with boys."  But a few years ago when doctors planned an operation to remove their third leg, it was serious Dasha who became so upset that the doctors dropped the idea.

 

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Masha and Dasha Krivoshiyapova (3 January 1950 – 17 April 2003) were Russian conjoined twins.

Masha and Dasha were of the Ischiopagus tripus variety. They were joined at the hip with their spines conjoined at 180-degree angles in a unique way which made surgical separation impossible. Their unique connection included three legs shared between them, a shared single lower intestine, four kidneys utilized by one bladder, one shared reproductive system and a circulatory system that pumped the same blood through both women's bodies.

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