Two conjoined 14-month-old twins will be arriving in Melbourne from Bhutan to meet with surgeons at the Royal Children's Hospital to have a life-changing operation.
Nima and Dawa Pelden will undergo surgery at the Royal Children's Hospital to separate the sisters joined at the stomach, following Children First foundation fundraising efforts.
The girls will arrive in Melbourne on Tuesday.
Children First Foundation chief executive Elizabeth Lodge, who is helping to bring the girls to Australia, said on Tuesday the girls were relying on the life-changing surgery.
"These little girls are depending on it. Their lives will be changed forever as a result of this extraordinary surgery," she told 3AW radio.
"They are joined but they are independent. We want them completely independent and doing their own thing, and getting home and giving their brothers and sisters a hard time."
She said they were "doing very well" but were struggling with weight loss and would meet the surgeons in the next couple of days.
RCH head of paediatric surgery Joe Crameri said while they were prepared to go for days he hoped the surgery would take up to eight hours to separate the "largely separate" twins.
"They have just a small area near the abdomen than the head. We are hoping that will be a less complicated thing to divide, and ultimately when we divide we are still leaving them with a fully functioning system," he told 3AW.
He was confident the girls would have enough skin and muscle to close both of them and hoped they would be up and around within four to six weeks.
He has not yet laid eyes on the twins but will assess them over the next couple of days.
The foundation has to raise $250,000 for the surgery and another $100,000 for their post-surgery 24-hour care with the call out for the community to donate.
The girls could stay with the foundation's retreat in Kilmore for about six months, and will require intense physiotherapy before they are able to return home.
Their mother and nurse is coming with the girls, and their paediatric surgeon will hopefully arrive in the coming weeks to be part of the surgery.
The bid comes nine years after the foundation and the hospital successfully separated Bangladeshi sisters Trishna and Krishna.
File image of Krishna (left) and Trishna (right) in 2009. Source: AAP
Bhutan is a landlocked country, isolated at the foothills of the Himalayan mountains with a population of about 775,000.
The south Asian nation is known for measuring its gross national happiness as a way of gauging its people's prosperity.
