Yeah right. They are leading normal lives.

Keeping these girl alive was selfish and cruel.

That's sooo sweet that they are still alive! :) I wish them and their family the best. The world needs success stories like this.

The only way children such as this stand any chance of surviving is if they remain in America and skip home vists to their families in emerging nations. As a former medical missionary, involved with a similar organization, I saw numerous kids sent home, for home visits only to contract life threatening illnesses. It only makes sense as their immune systems are shot for a long time and the lifestyle in those areas is not particularly clean and many children get no immunizations.

A number of years ago, I was involved in bringing a newborn who was a burn victim into the states for care. He had numerous surgeries and at one year of age his primary "burn doc" wanted him to go home for a vist. I hit the roof as he had not had his MMR shot yet as the doctor said if it wasn't safe yet. My contention was if he couldn't hande an MMR, he didn't need to be going back to a S American jungle village where NOBODY gets immunizations. The doctor knew more than I did and he went home for a 30 day visit. Three weeks later I got a Christmas Day phone call notifying me that the child had just died of measles.

My job was to screen kids to establish if they could be reasonably treated and returned to their parents within a reasonable time. That could be several years. It was heart breaking work. Some kids were dieing and money was limitted. I knew that some kids could be helped greatly but would need to remain in the States because life threatening problem COULD pop up and they needed to be near sophisticated medical care.

I could go on and on about the problems involved in assisting these kids but you don't want to know about it. I hope the twins stay here permanently.

God bless these 2 girl's. Life sometimes is hard and these two are fighting it with a strength we other's do not know. Go Ladies!!!

$1.5M spent and the result is two significantly handicapped kids. Is it worth it? I realize that it is private money and private money can be spent on anything that the people with the money want to spend it on (provided that it doesn't impinge on other people's rights). But is it wise to spend it on this? To be clear, I get what the parents are going through. My middle daughter was in a NICU for four months and her care cost over $1/3M. She died in my arms at four months. My youngest's care cost $1/4M and she is now perfectly healthy and starting her 3rd year of college. I do get it but sometimes just because you want something doesn't mean you can have it. Life isn't fair, it just is. And spending millions on two kids instead of using that money to help thousands of others just doesn't seem right to me.

I understand your feelings in this matter as I had a child with severe developmental deficitsts that I could not get proper care for while I was screening kids in south and central America for five star care. In order to bring these kids in, you had to have an appropriate specialist to agree to donate services and other doctors such as pediatrician, anesthesiologist etc. Then you had to get the hospital they worked out of to donate services. The super specialists in the major teaching hospitals were interested in getting patients that presented problems that we don't see very often in this country. A good example is the fact that I can't tell you how many kids I brought in for corrective surgery following polio. You see all kinds of malformations due to the mother's malnutrition durring pregnancy. Personally, I would prefer to see more private sector money being dontated for the care of the American kids whose medical expenses are overwhelming. I know there is private sector money is donated to domestic charities but the money doesn't seem to trickle down to the patient level like it does for foreign charities. Just my opinion. It's pretty confusing and I can argue both sides of the debate

wjrust, people who have never dealt with a significantly handicapped child do not know what they are talking about. It remains to be seen what dealing with this child will do to our family. It's easy to sit back and judge; it's not so easy to walk the walk.

Amen. I know it may sound trite but a support group is soooo very helpful. Nobody understands unless they have been there. There isn't anyone else you can really call in the middle of the night without worrying about "bothering" them. Good support groups are a tight family and a huge treasure chest of information and resources. Best wishes.