Help Alicia with Her Life-Saving Heart Surgery

Meet Alicia de los Ángeles Ruiz Carvajal - a beautiful ten-year-old girl who is full of life, despite the fact that her own quality of life has been taken from her due to not one, but three different, very rare heart conditions she has lived with since birth. Alicia's diagnosis - Tetralogy of Fallot - is very complex, and as most children who do not undergo heart surgery by age 3 die, Alicia is the oldest living child in Nicaragua with this pathology, and the time has finally come for her to receive the surgery she desperately needs. According to medical statistics, Alicia should not have lived until now, but miraculously she has survived, and now we can help her extend her life and start living it to the fullest!

 

Alicia will be in Boston with her mother for at least 3 to 4 months recovering from her heart surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital, and while the surgery itself has been financed, the rest is up to us. She will need two different surgeries - one for stabilization and then the final procedure. As her family lives in extreme poverty, we will need to raise funds for her transportation costs, shelter during her recovery period after the surgeries, food, translator support, etc. The Roberto Clemente Health Clinic (http://nicaclinic.org) will be covering as much of these costs as possible, but we still have so much more to raise.

 

Our brave little Alicia lives in a rural area with extreme poverty in a home surrounded by three plastic bags and one brick wall in Nicaragua. In order to survive and stay alive, Alicia spends 3.5 hours traveling each way to the Roberto Clemente Health Clinic in Nicaragua, where she has been receiving her treatments thus far. The saddest part of it all is that this sweet girl loves learning more than anything else, but she has not been able to go to school for the past year and a half due to her heart condition, which has devastated her in more ways than one. Yet, regardless of it all, this beautiful little girl still smiles and laughs with that gleaming look of hope in her eyes. Alicia has not allowed the struggles in her life to take away her smile or her hope, so let’s do what we can to give her a new chance at life!

 

Alicia has such a beautiful heart that at the end of her early December visit to the Roberto Clemente Health Clinic for her surgical evaluation, she offered her most precious possession to Dr. Mosquera and Dr. Ruiz – a full jar of shells. Knowing the value of such a commodity, each doctor chose three shells and sent Alicia home with a jar still more than halfway full. The doctors promised to reunite Alicia with those shells when she arrived to the US for her life-saving surgery. Let’s do what we can to keep Alicia’s beautiful smile on her face and raise enough money for her postsurgical recovery!