IRVINE : 2 Soviets Take Detour for Surgery

When Soviet officials first mentioned that they were adding two more children to a student exchange program, instructors and parents at the host school, Olympus High in Salt Lake City, were alarmed.

As English teacher Carol Spackman recounted Monday, the Soviet officials warned in a communique that the two extra children had “cancer spots.”

Actually, neither 12-year-old Vladimir Kozolov nor 17-year-old Natalia Lebedeva has cancer. But both bear disfiguring birthmarks--Vladimir has a dark-red blemish known as a “port wine stain” on his cheek and Natalia has a large black mark on her abdomen.

The two arrived in Salt Lake City last week with 20 other students. During their stay with American families, the students will tour the Grand Canyon and Disneyland.

Next Monday, however, Vladimir and Natalia will take a three-day medical detour--to the Beckman Laser Institute in Irvine. There they will undergo laser surgery aimed at erasing their birthmarks for good.

The treatment is not available in the Soviet Union, laser institute officials said. There, most citizens, including Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev who bears a “port wine stain” on his head, must accept their blemishes for life.

But last September, as the institute’s director of research, Dr. J. Stuart Nelson, toured the Soviet Union and lectured on laser treatments for children, he met Vaclav Pismenny, director of the I.V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and an organizer of student exchange programs. Pismenny suggested adding several children with birthmarks to a student exchange group he had planned.

Dr. Michael Berns, the institute’s director, agreed to treat them at no charge.

Since then, the institute has set up a Childrens Treatment Fund containing $22,000 for families who cannot afford the cost of laser surgery. Berns said next week’s treatments may be the first of many for Soviet children, although, he added, he wants to save some of the funds for American children, too.

On Monday, Berns, Nelson and Joyce Zeiler, director of nursing, flew to Salt Lake City to examine Vladimir and Natalia, “to make sure they had conditions we can treat,” Berns said.

They did, he reported, and their American hosts said both children were elated about their upcoming surgery. Explained Vladimir through an interpreter, “It is very good. . . . I want to look very fine.”

According to Berns, both surgeries will take about half an hour. He said Natalia’s can be performed under local anesthesia with a pulsed ruby laser that delivers bursts of red light to break up pigment under the skin. Vladimir will have general anesthesia so his marred cheek can be treated with a pulsed dye laser; its yellow light can destroy unwanted blood vessels without harming the skin.

Berns hopes that after the surgeries the children can spend the night with Orange County families who speak Russian. But if not, the children will stay Tuesday night with institute officials, then return to Salt Lake City on Wednesday.

Both Vladimir and Natalia will probably need a second treatment, Berns said. So “maybe in a year or two, we’ll find a way to bring them back” or perhaps by then, Soviet doctors will have their own lasers, he said.

Berns called the medical treatment for these children a first. “Getting around the bureaucracy” in the Soviet Union and at the U.S. State Department is usually “a formidable task. But not the way we did it,” he said.

“The nice thing is that Prof. Pismenny is pretty high up in the Soviet establishment,” he said. “His boss is Gorbachev’s science adviser. So he can cut through the red tape on his end. And at our end--we just did it. . . . The kids came. I didn’t ask for visas. We circumvented the bureaucracy.”