Positivity: Samoan baby, a miracle survivor receiving treatment in South Florida
From Fort Lauderdale, Florida:
April 20, 2008
Severely disfigured from birth defects, “Baby Miracle” was given 24 hours to live.
Now 8 months old, Miracletina Julie Nanai gurgles and guzzles like any ordinary infant. She nestles in her parents’ arms, squirms in the bath and cries for milk.
But unlike most newborns, she is a minor celebrity — a Samoan native whose parents’ drive to help her survive has inspired several Web sites championing her cause and an outpouring of support. To that end, dozens of people turned out at for a festive luau on Saturday to raise money for her medical treatment.
The gathering at Snyder Park was sponsored in part by the Council of Chiefs from Samoa, a Fort Lauderdale-based organization comprising about 50 Samoan clan chiefs across the state. Organizers hoped to raise about $150,000 to help pay for several surgeries she underwent last month at Miami Children’s Hospital and her ongoing treatment.
Aside from the money being raised, two surgeons at the hospital donated their time, and hospital officials agreed to cover about $125,000 for some of her medical bills, said Caroline Paul-Ah chong, a Samoan-based co-founder of Thorn Ministries Inc., a charitable relief organization in Riverview that arranged the baby’s medical treatment.
“I am overwhelmed by the generosity and the outpouring of love that has been given to my baby,” said the baby’s mother, Sefulu Nanai, 28, through an interpreter Saturday. “The hope is that we’ve achieved what we came here for. We hope this will prolong her quality of life.”
Indeed, the baby may live a “long, long” time, said S. Anthony Wolfe, chief of plastic surgery at Miami Children’s Hospital, who teamed up last month with John Ragheb, chief of pediatric neurosurgery, to reconstruct the baby’s cleft lip, nostrils and a plum-sized defect on her spinal cord related to spina bifida, a birth defect.
The corrective surgeries allow the baby eat and breath more easily, Wolfe noted.
From the beginning, those have been her primary challenges.
Doctors initially didn’t feed her as a newborn, Paul-Ah chong said, thinking her deformed mouth made it all but impossible. After four days in an incubator, her father, Mikaele Nanai, secretly fed her formula with a syringe. She thrived. So much so that doctors eventually sent the couple home with their baby. She soon earned the nickname “Baby Miracle” from the local media who chronicled her struggle. Her parents then changed her name to Miracletina Julie Nanai.
Go here for the rest of the story.
