Our 2024 Guatemala Cleft Trip: Day Five of Surgeries

Today was the final day of surgeries on LWB’s 2024 cleft trip to Antigua, Guatemala. It has been the most amazing week of transformations, and we thank you for following along!

Morning rounds today were filled with lots of happy parents, as they know they are very close to going home and showing off their children’s new smiles.

Here are just a few of the before and afters from surgeries done yesterday. We are so happy with the results!

Today we had another team member require some emergency medical treatment, this time for a suspected spider bite.

Like the other nurses on our team, dedicated Nurse Kirstin just kept powering through despite her discomfort.

As we made rounds this morning, we stopped at the bedside of 18-month-old Lily, a repeat patient to LWB. Born with cleft lip and palate, she had her lip repaired on our very first cleft trip to Guatemala. We had fun sharing photos with her mom from that trip that were still on our phones!

When we first met Lily as a baby, she was completely wrapped up in a blanket. Mayan babies are often carried by their moms this way, enveloped like a cocoon.

Baby Lily was the first child born to a Mayan family who lives far up in the mountains. Her family traveled for an entire day to reach the nearest town, including two hours of walking on rural dirt roads followed by a long eight-hour journey on a crowded chicken bus.

Lily was born at home in their small village. When her parents first saw their baby’s face, they cried so much as they wondered why their precious daughter had been born with a condition that would make her life so difficult. Thankfully, they soon connected with a rural health advisor who informed them that help was possible through surgery.

When the health promoter explained that the baby would need to weigh 10 pounds before surgery could be done, Lily’s mother made sure her daughter would qualify. At just two months of age, when she came to see our team, Lily weighed in at a whopping 17 pounds!

Lily’s mother told our team last year that she had not been separated from her daughter, even for a moment, since the day she was born. You can imagine how difficult it was to let complete strangers take her baby girl away to go back to the OR.

During last year’s cleft trip, Lily’s mom could not hold back her tears, and we were grateful she had one of our nurse’s shoulders to lean on.

When she was allowed to see Lily once again in the recovery room, however, all of her tears turned to joy!

You can imagine our excitement this year when we saw this lovely mother come on our intake day to see our team again. She told us she had waited anxiously for our return and was so happy the same surgeons would now repair Lily’s cleft palate.

Dr. Ness did such a wonderful job repairing Lily’s cleft lip on the last trip. She has the tiniest little scar that is hardly visible.

We wish we could say that Lily was as excited to see our team again as we were to see her. However, most of the photos we took show her understandable suspicion of the same people who put who through a previous operation. Thankfully, after her palate repair surgery by Dr. Tollefson this week, Lily finally gave us a shy little smile. We’ll take that as a win!

Today we also welcomed eight-month-old Jeffrey to the LWB family. He arrived to the hospital with both of his parents, who told us he is the youngest of five children.

Jeffrey’s dad is a trumpet player in a Mayan region about four hours from Antigua. He shared that he took very good care of his wife during her pregnancy, so he was shocked when his son was born with part of his lip missing. He said that in his whole life, he had only seen one other person with this condition and didn’t understand why something like cleft would happen.

The post-op room at the hospital is quite small, so only mom was allowed to go back to hold Jeffrey as he recovered.

As he waited out in the courtyard for the chance to see his son, Jeffrey’s dad told us his heart was filled with happiness because Jeffrey’s future was about to change in a very big way. Just look at his beautiful repair!

On our final day of surgeries, we also said a very special goodbye to Ronald, the gentleman who who showed up on our first day of triage with a dream of having his lip repaired after 52 years and three failed attempts.

Ronald has been on his own in the hospital this week, and the only person in his family who knew he was making the journey was his wife. He didn’t fully believe that our team would repair his lip since doctors had said in the past that it would never be done. Our team of surgeons felt differently and found room in their surgery schedule to repair his cleft lip at last.

Following his surgery yesterday, Ronald had recovered enough to make the long journey back home. As he never had the chance to learn to read or write, he put his thumbprint on the discharge papers as we watched. After receiving final instructions on how to care for his stitches, he quickly got his backpack ready to go.

Ronald has a good friend who hired him six years ago to pick coffee beans on his farm. When this friend learned about surgeons coming to Guatemala to offer free medical care through LWB, he phoned Ronald right away and told him he should try once more to get his cleft lip repaired.

When this friend arrived at the hospital to take Ronald home, we took him back to the ward to see Ronald’s new appearance. His friend couldn’t believe it, saying repeatedly “very, very good.” When we asked the friend if he thought Ronald’s wife would approve, he laughed and said, “Absolutely yes!”

As we said our final farewells at the hospital, we asked Ronald what he planned to do next. This quiet and humble man responded with two words:

“Be happy.”

We think Ronald’s simple message completely summed up this amazing week.

THANK YOU, a thousand times over, for making our medical work possible. We’ll be writing two more blogs about the 2024 cleft trip next week when we return to the US. We hope you’ll stay tuned and keep following along!

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