Mending Scars of Body and Soul : Free Operations Transform Social, Physical Well-Being of the Poor

When Juan Sainz Zamora was a very little boy and didn’t know any better, he threw a can of paint into a fire near his Tijuana home. The can exploded, burning the left side of his face and his neck.

The accident left Juan, now 7, terribly scarred, both physically and emotionally. His skin is stretched tight, almost webbed, where it was burned. And his bottom left eyelid rides too high, which dries out his eye, causing him constant discomfort and blurring his vision.

Doctors performed an innovative surgery Saturday, hoping to make life easier for Juan. First, they sliced the scar tissue under his eye. Next, they circumcised Juan. Then they took the foreskin and sewed part of it under his eyelid, the rest along his neck, figuring the elastic, healthy skin will grow with him and make him look--and see--better.

“Look at this kid,” said Carole Lee, one of the nurses who also took part in the operation. “How can you not want to help someone like this? We have so much here. And there, just a few miles away across a border, they have so little. There is so much need.”

Burn victims, children with a cleft lip or palate, teens with club feet, grown-ups with a variety of disabilities--all got the medical help they need Saturday, and all for free, through an unusual volunteer program run by a San Diego hospital and a local law firm.

In all, there were nearly 80 patients, all from Mexico, most from Tijuana, each unable at home to afford--or to find--extensive medical help. On hand at Mercy Hospital for the annual event were some three dozen doctors and about 150 nurses from around San Diego County.

Before and after the surgeries, the law firm of Thorsnes, Bartolotta, McGuire & Padilla housed and fed the patients and their families--in all, 114 people--at a nearby Hillcrest church, St. John’s, that opened the doors of its parish hall.

Lawyers and the firm’s office staff cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner. Law firm paralegals with nursing experience, teaming up with Navy medics, tended to surgical dressings. Off-duty Marines drove patients and families to and from the church and hospital.

“We all could have signed up to work security at Street Scene (the downtown San Diego music festival) and made $100 for the weekend,” said one of the Camp Pendleton-based Marines, Lance Cpl. Jamie Derouen,, 20, of St. Martinville, La. “But how often does a Marine like me get to give a kid a helping hand?”

The proceedings were laced with that spirit of generosity.

“It’s just the simple feeling of doing good,” said Chachay Rocha, 38, of Oceanside, a law firm employee. “And that’s such a good feeling.”

Some contributions came from an unexpected source. Mrs. Fields herself--Debbi Fields, 35, of Park City, Utah, the creator of the cookie empire--came by the hospital to donate seven cases of stuffed teddy bears, 100 dozen cookies and hundreds of red and white balloons.

A doctor who had participated in past events had written her about it, Fields said, adding that she hoped her donation would help out “in a small way.”

“I have five little girls,” Fields said while touring operating rooms dressed in hospital scrubs. “I wanted to see these children while they were going through their worst time.”

Cookies are an always-welcome treat, said Dallas Elliott, the administrator of the Thorsnes, Bartolotta law firm and a former lieutenant colonel and supply officer in the Marines. The law firm is likely to give at least $5,000 to house and feed all 114 people through the surgery and a couple of days of recuperation, he said.

“Whatever we spend is worth it,” said Vince Bartolotta, one of the firm’s partners. “All you have to do is see the look in these kids’ eyes after surgery. . . . It really makes us all feel good.”

At the hospital, where the costs ran into thousands of dollars, the sentiment was similar.

“I have three babies of my own at home,” said Kathy Long, 40, a registered nurse, holding 23-month-old Maria Hernandez in the recovery room, minutes after the child came out of surgery to fix her cross-eyed vision. “It makes me want to cry when I hear these kids crying, too. Today the best thing I can do is to be mothering these kids like they were my own.”

For the doctors and nurses working on children with a cleft lip or palate, feelings ran particularly high. Unlike most surgeries, an operation to fix a cleft lip leads to immediate visual gratification--for patient and doctor.

“In medicine, we rarely have the opportunity to change someone’s life in one day,” said Larry McCarthy, an Oceanside plastic surgeon. “But if we fix someone’s cleft lip, we can all see right away what that child is going to look like. It’s a delight.”

Even in modern Mexico, a cleft lip can still be viewed as the sign of an “evil spirit,” a lingering bit of folklore that marks a child as someone to be cast out from the community and deemed a source of shame to relatives.

“If a woman goes out during an eclipse, this can happen to the child as a punishment,” said Julia Gonzalez de Orozco, 52, of Tijuana, who was at the hospital for surgery to correct a severe hernia. “I don’t know if it’s true or not, but that’s what they say.”

“This is why you do this,” said McCarthy, putting the final stitches in 6-year-old Andres Bedoya’s upper lip. “It’s up to this little boy what he will do with himself. But now he won’t be disfigured, an object of ridicule. Without (surgery), there’s a good chance he would be ostracized. It’s really tragic.”

Cecilia Barralas, whose 1-month-old boy, Jose Tobar Barralas, was born with a cleft lip, looked on as her baby woke up in the recovery room. “I was scared when I first saw him, when he was born,” she said. “Now I feel he’ll be more normal. He’ll be spared the anguish.”

And as 7-year-old Juan slept off the anesthesia, his mother, Catarina Zamora Vega, 28, said she was hopeful the surgery would speed her son’s recovery from his horrible burns--and would also allow him to be more normal.

“I couldn’t be more thankful,” she said. “This will make a difference.”