Children's Heart- LIFE-SAVING CARDIAC SURGERY

Mission Bambini Foundation, as part of the Children’s Heart Program, has been engaged in the treatment of childhood heart diseases around the world since 2005. In order to save children with severe heart conditions, born in the poorest countries, one of the ways of intervention is to provide medical assistance on site.

Medical missions can have two different goals: supporting and training the local èquipe in difficult surgeries or supporting the medical team in screening patients, sharing knowledge and best practices to apply when visiting a potentially cardiopathic child.

During the last expedition, Mission Bambini’s team flew to Nepal to support the local medical èquipe in screening around 12,000 children, intercepted by involving 18 primary and secondary schools. 14 of them will need a surgical operation in the next months.

Among The screened children we met P., a 4 years old child with a sever heart condition.

P. was accompanied by her grandmother aa both her parents cannot take care of her.

Her father had developed an addiction to alcohol, which soon turned into a problematic behavior and led him to lose his job and divorce from P.’s mother.

On her own and with a child to feed and take care of, the mum needed to find a job quickly: she was hired as a construction yard worker in Dubai.

P.’s mum can come back to Nepal only once every two weeks for just 7 days, after which she has to fly back to work.

The situation, already enough hard on itself, left no other choice to P. and her mother but to ask the child’s grandmother to be the main caregiver.

Despite these difficulties, a bright future nevertheless lies ahead for little P. In fact, she has been placed on the list of children waiting for a heart operation at Mission Bambini, which will be able to guarantee her a better life expectancy and quality of life. The operation, scheduled for the next mission in March 2023 if more serious cases are not identified, will allow her heart to function better.