Us two against the world

Sisters defy all odds to keep growing and start school

- MATT ROPER

ON the day conjoined twins Marieme and Ndeye were born in May 2016, dad Ibrahima Ndiaye was told they had a few days, weeks at best, to live.

When they survived, specialists then told him his daughters would not live for longer than a few more months.

Again, against the odds, they did, and incredibly the girls will be celebrating their 8th birthday this year. But their prognosis remains the same – and so their dad is grateful for every second.

“When you are told since the beginning there is no future, you live for the present,” says Ibrahima. “Nothing the doctors tell me has changed, the fact is that any minute, any second, the worst could happen and I could lose them.

“I’m concentrating on right now, making every day a surprise, and celebrating life.”

That the girls, thought to be the only growing conjoined twins in Europe, have confounded medics for so long, and are even attending mainstream school near their home in Cardiff, is miraculous.

Many would also credit their survival to their dad, who gave up a job as a CEO to care for them. Ibrahima’s incredible journey with his daughters has been documented in a BBC documentary, Inseparable Sisters, which airs tomorrow.

Following their birth in Dakar, Senegal, Marieme and Ndeye were found to have separate hearts, lungs and spines but shared a liver, bladder and digestive system, and had three kidneys between them.

Ibrahima, 51, who worked as a managing director for a tourism firm, said four separate scans during the pregnancy did not indicate twins.

Conjoined twins occur in one out of 60,000 births, so getting the news after they were born was “a massive shock”.