Why Are This Boy’s Lips Blue?
Short answer: Eduardo has a hole in heart. Or he had a hole in his heart. Jump for more:
Earlier I shared a dispatch from our staff photographer, Elizabeth Lavin, who is in Honduras on assignment. You’ll have to wait for a future issue of the “print product” to enjoy the fruits of her labor as they’re meant to be enjoyed. But I’ll tell you for now that she’s down there documenting the efforts of a group from Children’s Medical Center. The group is led by Dr. Hisashi Nikaidoh, a heart surgeon of some renown (he’s got a procedure named after him). They travel to perform life-saving heart surgeries on kids who quite obviously couldn’t afford them. Anyway, Elizabeth sends the following explanation of the purple lips:
On Sunday the medical and support staff drove two hours to the coast of Honduras to a small beach to prepare for the week ahead. The group includes 27 people from the Heart Center at Children’s, led by Dr. Nikaidoh in association with the Friends of Barnabus Foundation.
I was not prepared for what was ahead of me. Monday most of us stayed at the hospital for 16 hours. I observed an open heart surgery and watched while the doctors stopped Eduardo’s heart so they could patch the hole in it. It was the most amazing thing I have ever seen. His blood was thick and blue from being deprived of oxygen all his life. He’s 7. Kids with his same problem in the United States get it corrected at 6 months. Eduardo represents the poorest of the children in Honduras. These are the kids the group attends to. After surgery, he started excessively bleeding and he was brought back into the ER and opened up again. He’s fine now. We didn’t find out until post-op about the lice that he had. The doctors were on their feet working tirelessly all day.
They will perform about four open heart surgeries a day, along with countless catheter procedures. Tomorrow I will be taking a trip up to the mountains to Eduardo’s home to meet his father and brothers.
2 Comments to “Why Are This Boy’s Lips Blue?”
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There is a dentist in Allen, TX, Dr. Tom Brian, who has created his own mission down there. He provides free dental care to children there. Also, works to have facial clefts and deformities fixed. I went for a week in March 2006 and worked on the school he is building for the kids down there. He operates in Puerto Lempira - on the Moskito coast. We had to fly in to Puerto Lempira as it is isolated from the rest of the country by swamps - no roads reach this remote region of Honduras. You can see more about his work here:
http://www.send-hope.org/
He really makes a difference and does incredible work. The kids flocked to our plane as soon as it rolled to a stop on the dirt strip…
I was one of the nurses that went last year to Honduras. One of the most surprising parts of the flight was the fact that almost the entire plane was comprised of mission people all going to this country to help. Some built churches, some were dentists, some eye doctors, some general practitioners going up to the mountains to treat the people who cannot make it down to the city. Some of the stories of how parents travelled for days to come to the city to see the heart doctors that could fix their child was heart breaking and heart moving simultaneously.