6 week old baby needs public assistance in seeking surgery abroad
Ramiro Duran
The family of six-week-old Alyssa Aguilar, born with a rare cardiopulmonary condition, is tonight appealing to the Belizean public to assist in raising much needed funds for corrective surgeries abroad. The procedures will be conducted in Guatemala on September twenty-third and the family is trying its best, with the assistance of the medical community, to raise a minimum of thirteen thousand U.S. dollars. Today they held a barbecue sale but are still relying on your kind contribution to assist in their endeavor.
Ramiro Duran, Grandfather of Alyssa Aguilar
“The heart is divided into four parts. What actually happens is when a child is in the fetal stage, they do not use their lung to breath, but the heart has an artery that goes from the heart to the lungs…that is what pushes blood to lungs after the child is born. And when the child was born, they found out that the artery…but there is another small vein that also runs to the lung from the heart and this one is bumping a little bit of deoxidized blood to the lungs for the child to breath. So the child is breathing at this stage, but very little because the amount of blood that goes to the hearty. So what the child needs, and what the doctors had recommended because some specialists had come from the states and they thought that the child should be operated from the time she was two week—what they are thinking is that if the stem can be unblocked, then they can do the other operation. The child needs another operation to patch a hole that is in the middle of the heart.”
Isani Cayetano
“At this point there is a massive fundraising effort going on to try to raise the monies for these operations. Can you talk to us a little about that?”
Ramiro Duran
“What we are really doing is doing food—three or four times a week—and we have a lot of support. My daughter works at B.E.L. and she gets a lot of help from there and the doctors at the hospital because my son-in-law is a doctor there too. We get a lot of support. So whatever food we make for fundraising for that day, we make a hundred, a hundred and fifty, we make two hundred, we sell it because the community is very much in support of this.”
Isani Cayetano
“Is there anything you would ask of the wider community who may be watching this particular piece with regards to baby Alyssa and the necessary help?”
Ramiro Duran
“I watch the news all the time that a lot of people go to the media and ask for help from people. We don’t want to really jam this thing with another one and things like that cause that’s what most people do. If we can get any help, it is okay. But we are not really demanding because whatever fundraising that we are doing, we are trying to get some help. The operation in Guatemala is going to cost about twelve or thirteen thousand dollars. So whatever we can, we are going to try and raise this.”
