To see the original post click here. Shelby has so many beautiful things to say about the work we are doing here in Madagascar.
"You came to the ward this afternoon. There was talk on the ward about your arrival. Someone said you had been found while the advance team was looking for patients. They didn’t expect to find you.
You came with your mom to the ship, wrapped in a pink blanket so tightly that I couldn’t even see you. You were just a bundle of pink in your mom’s tiny arms. At not even five feet tall, your mom is small to me. But you were so much smaller. I heard your cry from your blanket and your mom began to breast feed you. Still, I did not see your face. You were in a corner in the room. Many doctors came to see you because you were special. But special isn’t always something good. It means you had to be poked several times to draw blood because your veins are so small. Your little cry became much stronger as we attacked your veins for blood. This was heartbreaking to hear. It’s the worst part of our jobs. But you are so small and need so much care that we had to keep trying until we got enough. There is no way to explain this to you.
I finally see your little feet poke out from the bottom of the blanket. They are beautiful feet. Tears well up in my eyes even though you aren’t my patient, but that doesn’t matter. I still find that I love you and I haven’t even seen you. I automatically think of God and how much he loves each one of us. How much His heart breaks for us when we are hurt. How much he wants to heal every one of our pains and put us back perfectly together while we trudge on in this fallen world. I am overwhelmed by how much I can be loved by God, who created me and knows me intimately, if I love you as much as I do and I haven’t even seen your face.
You have a dirty diaper. Despite getting hardly any food, you manage to void and get a diaper change. I see your long legs and again hear your plea. Your little legs shake from the cold of the room as we obtrusively undress you. The diaper you are wearing is for a newborn, but it is huge on you, swallowing up over half your body. Your mom goes to redress you in newborn clothes, which look like they are made for a two year old they are so big for you. She places a bonnet on your head to keep you warm. She is doing her absolute best. She goes to breastfeed you again. She continues this routine nearly every thirty minutes. I don’t know how she’s been doing this for seven months. I don’t think she’s slept, but by her quiet and continuous care and obvious fierce love for you, she doesn’t show the wear it has put on her.
Finally, your little head pops out from the blanket. My heart melts. You are the most beautiful baby girl. Your small face and wrinkles on your forehead make you look like a tiny newborn, but your long feet and hands reveal your age. You are seven months old, but your eyes carry sorrow deeper than I knew they could go. Your seven months have been a battle. Your little body, somehow surviving, is the proof that you are a fighter. And that your mother is fighting with you. The cleft on your lip tells the story of why your life has been such a battle. You have a bilateral cleft lip and palate. It’s an opening in your mouth and lip where your lips and mouth bones didn’t fuse all the way, leaving a gap that travels from your nostril down to where your lip should end. But this is split for you, on both sides and under both nostrils. And because you don’t have a contiguous mouth, the little free-floating piece of upper mouth below your nose sticks far out. Your tongue has been pushing up against it in your attempt to get food and no lips exist to help push it back. Our lips are the reasons all of our upper jaws and teeth don’t stick straight out, but because you have no such barrier, your maxilla just keeps extending forward. The holes in your mouth mean you can’t make a good seal in order to breastfeed and because you can’t eat, you are starving. I hear you were born weighing eight pounds, but at seven months old you weight under five. In seven months you’ve actually lost weight, even though you’ve somehow continued to grow. Your long skinny fingers and beautiful feet tell you are not new to this world, and your body bears the scars of one who has had to fight for every day of life.
Our goal on the ward will be to spend the next few months attempting to get you as much nutrition as you’ve missed since birth. We will give you formula to help supplements your mother’s milk, carefully watching your weight and lab levels to make sure you will tolerate your new feeding program. Our goal is not only to get you healthy, but healthy enough to have surgery. Surgery that will fix your cleft lip and palate. Surgery that will allow you to eat and speak. There is a possibility you will have hearing damage due to improper drainage for your ears, and speech problems due to the loss of your palate, but these are issues we can’t now address. Our goal is to get you to surgery. Our goal is for you to live.
And so we pray for you. We pray you will tolerate the new feeds. We pray that you will gain weight. We pray that you will recover fast enough to make it to surgery while we are still here, that we won’t have to leave you behind knowing you regained your health and your strength but are left with a cleft. We pray that you will survive."
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