The 'normal' often have a weird fascination with the 'abnormal'. (I have covered something similar here.) I look a little 'odd' and I have become accustomed to the stares of strangers; the furtive glances which hide the very real desire for enlightenment , an enlightenment which the world seems so very embarrassed to reveal. Why do you look like that? In what way are you different? Are you so very different? This is a natural human reaction to 'difference'; a natural. emotional response to those 'not of my tribe' and you do become accustomed to it. However, I find myself at a loss, floundering in a sea of incomprehensibility, in considering conjoined, Siamese twins.
The most well documented conjoined twins before the present, were two brothers born in Thailand, formerly Siam, Chang and Eng Bunker (not their original surname but they ended up settling down in an area of the US which had been predominantly settled by immigrants from the German-speaking part of Europe - remember it was not Germany before 1870!), although they were surely not the first to be so born; children with separate lives but who shared a common body. Chang and Eng were born to a not-so-enlightened age as our's and so passed a good proportion of their lives as 'sideshow freaks' first in a show by Robert Hunter and then in P T Barnum's circus. In between times, they acquired a plantation, two wives (sisters), 21 children between them and, being in nineteenth century North Carolina, some slaves! Strangely for a such a famous pair of twins, they shared very little of their bodies, being joined only at the chest with only the liver being shared; it would have been a relatively simple task to separate them nowadays. Sadly, they died within hours of each other.
Never having been blessed, or cursed depending on my mood, with offspring, I find it hard to imagine myself as a parent most of the time. Obviously, I can use what empathy has been given to me and what is left of my basic humanity but it is only a pastiche of what parents must (I hope) feel towards their children. However, in the case of conjoined twins my empathy, my sense of what it is to be another human being fails me. We are accustomed to treating a body as though it were a separate entity, as a very distinct human being. In the case of conjoined twins this is not so easy and I do wonder how parents cope with that dichotomy. In the case of Chang and Eng Bunker, the adjustment was not, probably, that difficult. Although joined at the chest, they had four arms, four legs, two heads; in all but the most trivial of details they were clearly two separate people.
However, I have been watching, intermittently it is true, a series about the Hensel twins; I detest 'reality TV' programmes, even the ones that pique my interest somewhat. Abi(gail) and Brittany Hensel are conjoined twins who share a body. Although they have separate spinal columns, two sets of lungs and two hearts, they share but one pair of arms, one pair of legs and lower torso and one genito-urinary tract. I did not catch the digestional arrangements, although I believe that they have separate stomachs but share a colon. Each twin has control over only her side of the shared body and arms and legs, the two heads lying atop the body, although the heads are at slightly different angles, Abi's lies about 5° 'off vertical to the right, Brittany's about 15° to the left.
The twins appear to be well adjusted, normal college graduates, just out of school, and on the assumption that one plays the hand that life deals you, the cost of 'folding' is too high in most people's opinion, and they have had more than twenty years to become accustomed to doing everything together in relative harmony, literally, one would not expect anything else. Again, as one would expect, they are, as all twins are who grow up in the same household with similar experiences and similar friends, like but unlike only perhaps a little more like than unlike.
What intrigued me the most, after I had indulged myself for a brief minute or so with memories of Mark Wing-Davey's 'Zaphod Beeblebrox', President of the Galaxy* ('Like the extra head, suits you' as Ford Prefect once said), I came to be more interested in the parents than the twins. The 'disabled' make far less of an issue of their 'disability', whatever it happens to be, for the very simple fact that, for them, it is normal, if often unusual, not commonplace.
I am a cynical person, though I try very hard not to be but it is difficult for me not to think that the parents said what they felt we wanted to hear; not you understand out of malice, deception or an opportunity to con the world into thinking that they were the best parents since sliced bread. It is quite the natural thing to do; you have to keep some of it, whatever it is, joy, pain, anguish, inside yourself otherwise everything is spectacle and it becomes a real P T Barnum sideshow.
For many parents of conjoined twins whatever decisions they have to make are often made for them. About one half of twins so joined are still-born; around a further quarter have abnormalities preventing prolonged survival. Only about 25% of conjoined twins actually can expect to have a relatively normal life expectancy. However, the more I considered the parents' situation, the more I came to realise that, although the sense of what you have become accustomed to in your normal, quotidian existence of tubes, buses, supermarkets, work, getting pied-eyed with your pals, is initially sent reeling, you would very quickly adjust to the 'difference' and, as someone once said to me, you look past it to the person within; I imagine that this is so much easier for a parent.
The dog in the title is, of course, the one that failed to bark in Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story, 'Silver Blaze' when an intruder allegedly breaks in to steal the horse but it turns out to have been an 'inside' job which Holmes correctly deduces from the fact that the dog did not raise the alarm. By the same token, the Hensel twins do nothing which appears out of the ordinary for girls/women of their age which makes for, in my view, quite boring television.
* Zaphod Beeblebrox, a character in Douglas Adams' 'The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy', who picks up the hitch-hiking Betelgeusian, Ford Prefect. and his earthling travelling companion, Arthur Dent, who Ford has saved from the demolition of planet Earth by the Vogons, to make way for a hyperspace express route.
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