Bitew

Bitew, a mother of a 6-year-old and a 10-year-old, wept in despair as she talked to me. She has very little hope of ever being cured from the disfiguring tumor that has cursed her life for the last five years. Even now, with her surgery on the OR schedule, she is obviously terrified.  She is afraid that something will happen which will preventive the surgery from actually taking place and will take away this one chance she has at a normal life. In the exam room, as I performed her pre-anesthesia evaluation, she repeated again and again the circumstances surrounding her tumor and her life, pleading for help the whole time.

Muhedin

Bitew has a tumor called an “Ameloblastoma.” In the U.S., these tumors would be removed when they were still small.  It is extremely rare to see anything like this back home.  Bitew’s tumor is disfiguring and painful. She can no longer eat solid food. The only reason she

has hope for a future is that a few hardworking and visionary people came together to make it happen at CURE Ethiopia. An extremely dedicated and very experienced team of surgeons from Germany is coming to perform these life-changing surgeries for one week. This mission of mercy was initiated and coordinated by some very hardworking physicians here in Ethiopia and back home in the U.S.

Please pray for the upcoming surgeries being done at CURE this week. The acuity and technical difficulty of these surgeries is very high and beyond our normal scope. Every one of these patients is desperate and beyond hope.

Kassahun

Abebe

Mohammed

Originally posted at: http://ethiopia.thebernards.org/2012/01/22/difficult-surgical-cases-this-week/.