Burn Victim Slowly Getting His Wish Just to ‘Look Better’

The injured boy’s dream was a simple one, his mother explained: “He was thinking he would look better--that’s all.”

Ten-year-old Jose Perez Cruz was severly burned three years ago when he found a bottle of sulfuric acid near his home in Ocoyoacac, Mexico, tried to open it and it splashed in his face.

Doctors there gave his mother, Eugenia Cruz de Perez, some cream to put on the burns and said there was nothing more they could do.

But Cruz de Perez was determined to find help. Neither she nor her husband, who does menial work for a textbook company, could afford surgery in Mexico for the oldest of their three children, she said.

Through a friend, they learned of a Los Angeles charity, the Mexican Relief Fund, that would send Jose to Orange County for the reconstructive surgery he needs.

And last week, for the second time in three years, the Relief Fund brought Jose and his mother to Santa Ana for an operation.

Just as before, Dr. Val Lambroz, a plastic surgeon, donated his time. So did the anesthesiologist and nurses.

The Relief Fund also persuaded a major airline, Aeromexico, to give Cruz de Perez and her son free round-trip tickets from Mexico City to Los Angeles. And it arranged for free lodging for mother and son at the Saddleback Travel Lodge in Santa Ana.

On Wednesday, Lambroz operated on Jose in his office, releasing a scarred eyelid that had been scratching the boy’s left eye.

“I was worried for his eye,” Cruz de Perez said. “The little skin in his eye made him all the time crying.”

But the surgery went smoothly, Lambroz said. And by late last week, Jose was recuperating quietly at the motel--watching television, occasionally pushing a toy car along the hallway, and indulging in a new favorite food, hamburgers.

His left ear was bandaged where skin had been removed to make a graft that was stitched onto his eyelid, but angry red scars still pulled at his upper lip and fanned across his nose.

“He’ll probably have to have some more little touch-up procedures,” Lambroz said. It usually takes a couple of years for scars from burns to flatten out and become amenable to new surgeries, but typically burn surgeries are “multistage procedures,” the surgeon explained. “When you do burn reconstruction, it’s not a dramatic fell swoop. It’s nudging the tissue here, nudging the tissue there.”

Lambroz said he did not know if Jose and his mother would be able to return for additional operations. But he described Jose as an affable, uncomplaining child who “acts much older than his age . . . I’d be willing to take care of the kid until he’s an old man.”

Cruz de Perez also did not know if she and Jose would be able to return to Santa Ana. If they can’t, she vowed to find a job to pay for additional operations in Mexico. Though she needs to care for two other sons, ages 7 and 5, “I want to help Jose,” she said.

Jose was the first case for the Relief Fund, said Judy Pohlmann, a Los Angeles personnel director who, with actor Edward James Olmos, is co-director of the fund.

Olmos and Pohlmann had worked with a Floria relief agency to aid children injured in the September, 1985, earthquake in Mexico City. When they learned of other children who needed help, they formed a charity that accepts in-kind donations rather than cash. In addition to helping Jose, Pohlmann said, the fund recently brought several Mexican children to Miami for orthopedic surgeries there.

Jose’s scarred face will probably never look normal, Lambroz said. “But he is going to be a lot better than he was.” The boy’s mother agreed. “He will not be perfect when he grows up,” she said during her visit to Santa Ana for the first surgery two years ago. “But an attempt was made. The best was done to get him back to normal.”