 Common nonseparating disks in a Heegaard splitting

Two nonseparating compressing disks on opposite sides with the same boundary form an embedded sphere. Cutting each handlebody along its disk leaves it connected, so the sphere is nonseparating in the glued three-manifold. Capping the two resulting sphere boundaries gives a splitting of one lower genus of the remaining summand; the removed summand is $S^1\times S^2$.