Miracle Mermaid Baby Walks: Modern Surgery Separates Baby's Fused Legs

In 2004, a pretty little girl was born in Peru who had a very peculiar deformity - her legs were fused together, resembling a mermaid's tail. This rare condition is called sirenomelia, mermaid syndrome. In most cases, this is a fatal deformity because vital organs are also deformed. In this little girl, there was a chance.

Milagros (Miracle) Cerron was very lucky indeed. Her story got to the premier hospital in Lima, Peru, where a team of Peruvian and American doctors volunteered to help her. Careful care staved off the bladder and kidney infections that kill most children with sirenomelia, and in a four-hour operation, silicone bags were used to stretch the skin of her legs, a preparation used to ensure she had adequate skin to cover the legs when they were separated.

When she was a year old, her legs were separated to the knees. And a little more than a year later, they were separated all the way up, and reshaped to give her more flexibility and a chance to walk.

This wasn't fun for the little girl. The first operation to separate her legs was so traumatic that she stopped speaking, with doctors fearing she had a physiological problem with her speech as well. In order to ensure she had adequate care between operations, the Solidarity Hospital, where all her medical care takes place, gave her father Ricardo Cerron a job so the family could move down from their home in the Andes. And the City of Lima, recognizing the family's extreme poverty, has pledged to pay for many of the operations; charities and volunteer medical care takes care of much of the rest.

A Mermaid Walks

All this work and sacrifice has paid off. Recently, Milagros has learned to walk, only seven months after the full separation of her legs. Her deformed hips, knees, and ankles have been reshaped and work well for her. She has been running around the playground with other three-year-old girls, and is even taking ballet classes with her friends.

Her ordeal is not over yet. Her severe deformities extended to her urinary tract and lower digestive tract, so more operations will need to be done to reconstruct and separate them; and her doctors believe it will take as many as fifteen more years of rehabilitation and refining operations to complete the work of reshaping her.

Milagros is only the second child to have undergone successful surgery to correct this condition. The first, Tiffany Yorks, is an American; Yorks' doctor provided invaluable advice to the Peruvian team from his earlier experiences.