Lots of love and medicine heals 'resilient little muscle'
Cathleen Falsani/Religion News Service
Issue date: 7/12/09 Section: Divine Intervention
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The doctors also removed an extra membrane between the top and bottom chambers of his heart and closed another tiny hole at the top of his aorta. Now, thanks to the miraculous handiwork of his surgical team, Vasco's heart is working as God intended.
In the days since surgery, each time I've looked at Vasco, the Malawian AIDS orphan we met nearly two years ago while traveling in Africa, a line from Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters" has echoed in my mind: "The heart is a resilient little muscle."
By the time Vasco was wheeled in to intensive care an hour after surgeons closed the four-inch-long incision in his chest, that "resilient little muscle," which had been enlarged from 10 years of working overtime to pump blood despite the huge leak, already had begun to shrink to a normal size.
As Vasco lay in bed, tubes attached to nearly every appendage, I put my hand on his chest. Gone was the violent thunk-thunking of his wounded heart, the rabbit-like beat that violently shook his body even at rest.
In its place was the normal butterfly fluttering heartbeat of a child at rest - and at peace.
Vasco has a fierce spirit. He's small, but he's amazingly strong. A day after surgery, doctors removed the breathing tube in his throat and took him off the ventilator so he could breathe on his own.
Two days after surgery, he was sitting up in bed, eating French fries and chicken, laughing and joking at a Jackie Chan movie he has seen at least half a dozen times.
Not quite a week after surgery, doctors released Vasco from the hospital. He can eat whatever he wants but has to wait two months to play soccer, baseball or ride his bike, while his sternum heals completely.
A few years back, his caregiver, Mac, found Vasco living alone on the streets -- a fate all too common in sub-Saharan countries wracked by AIDS. In Malawi, an estimated 1 million children have been orphaned by AIDS; more than 60,000 of those children, like Vasco, end up living on the streets.
After his mother and father died, someone put Vasco out on the street to fend for himself, telling the tiny child he'd been cursed by a witch doctor, that ants were eating his heart and that soon he would die.
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