At six months, a tumor covered more than half of Nguyet’s face. In the Vietnamese village of Phuc Nam, no one wanted to look at her. Her mother, Lam, always took her out covered up to avoid horrified looks.
But a photo of that baby traveled far. A gardener showed it again and again in Dadeville, Alabama, and almost no one reacted. Until Patti Maxey, a retired flight attendant, saw it.
“If I don’t do something, the little girl will die”, she thought.
She didn’t give up. She launched a campaign to raise money and sought help wherever she could. It was the NGO Mending Kids, from San Francisco, that searched around the world for teams capable of handling a case like this. The response pointed to Madrid.
Mother and daughter, who had never left their village, flew 14.000 kilometers from Hanoi. Patti was waiting for them at Terminal 4 at Barajas, and accompanied them, paying her own way.
At Gregorio Marañón Hospital, they confirmed the diagnosis: a giant facial hemangioma. Then came four delicate operations. They reconstructed her eyelids, nose, lips, and cheek, and restored her hair.
Surgeon Beatriz Berenguer recounts it with a smile: Nguyet’s mother tells her that Nguyet is now more outgoing, that she plays with other children, and that no one turns away in horror anymore. They speak Vietnamese, but understand each other with Google Translate.
The girl no one wanted to look at now lets herself be seen.
