update on Hoang Son Pham

You may remember some time ago, I posted a few articles on the Vietnamese boy with the large growth on his face. It looks like he is now in Canada for treatment.

 

Subject: Race against time to save Vietnamese boy's life -Article in Today's Globe & Mail. Follow this link or see text below

Race against time to save Vietnamese boy's life

An Ottawa charity is inspiring hundreds to help in its quest to give an orphan life-saving surgery in Canada

HAYLEY MICK

From Thursday's Globe and Mail

June 28, 2007 at 4:35 AM EDT

Sitting on his bed in Hanoi, Hoang Son Pham plunged his small hand into the parcel sent from Canada. The 10-year-old Vietnamese orphan dug deep, past dozens of letters and cards addressed to him, and drew out something hard: a wooden airplane.

Son Pham said nothing - the tumour in his face made speech impossible - but he gave a lopsided smile as he cruised the toy through the air: a sign of things to come.

Late tonight, two months after receiving that goodwill package, Son Pham is expected to step off a jet in Toronto. Waiting for him will be a small group of elated Canadians who, for more than a year, have raced against time and a growing mass of blood vessels to bring him here for surgery.

"We want to welcome him," said Tan Ngo, a staff member with the Children's Bridge Foundation, an Ottawa-based charity that provides funding and support for international orphans. "But we have to be very careful."

Hoang Son Pham, a 10-year-old from Vietnam, will remain in Toronto for the next four months as doctors try to remove a tumour from his face.

Next week, Son Pham will undergo diagnostic tests at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Doctors will determine whether the boy is fit to undergo a life-threatening operation that would remove the massive knot of blood vessels - called hemangioma - and save him from starvation.

But this is not only a story of an unlucky child who may be rescued by Western medicine. It is also about a small group of Canadians who decided to make a difference in a boy's life, and the snowball effect that decision is now having across the country.

It began last March, when Kate Maslen, a 25-year-old manager with Children's Bridge, delivered equipment to an orphanage that houses about 800 children about an hour's drive north of Hanoi.

Dozens of children pushed to get close to the tall, blond Canadian woman, but it was a boy elbowed to the back of the crowd - the one with the giant tumour on the left side of his face - that she could not forget.

"This little guy snared my heartstrings," Ms. Maslen said.

She learned that Son Pham was dropped off by his parents when he was 3. Staff at the Hai Duong orphanage said the parents were likely too poor to care for the boy, or afraid that his deformity would bring bad luck - a local superstition.

Over the years, the tumour grew. Now, it was obliterating Son Pham's nose and shrinking his mouth to the size of a walnut. Orphanage officials feared that without treatment, he would soon be unable to eat or even to breathe.

Ms. Maslen brought photos of Son Pham back to Ottawa. She wanted to help, but her resolve was steeled when she received a handwritten note from Son Pham.

"Dear Aunt Kate," he wrote with someone's help. "Please help me."

Others came on board, deciding to fundraise and seek out medical care for the boy; one of those people was Mr. Ngo.

Mr. Ngo understood rough beginnings. Thirty years ago, Canada scooped him out of a Vietnamese refugee camp and gave him a new life in Ottawa. His two children grew up to be a pediatrician and a teacher, and Mr. Ngo dedicated his life to helping others.

Mr. Ngo returned several times to Hanoi and visited Son Pham. During one trip in March, Mr. Ngo fell ill eating 50-cent soup from roadside vendors because he wanted to donate the rest of his food stipend, provided by his work, to Son Pham's cause.

He also brought the boy a present from Canada: Halls cough drops, which he melted in water, and gave him to drink. Halls are available in Vietnam, too, but "I wanted to send him a message, that people in Canada loved him," Mr. Ngo said in an interview with The Globe and Mail from Hanoi.

In Canada, Children's Bridge was appealing for funds. Son Pham touched a nerve: This spring, more than $125,000 was raised from hundreds of families, much of it from Canada's Vietnamese community and parents of children from international adoptions.

A six-year-old boy from Halifax donated all $8 from his savings: "I hope that's enough for your surgery," he wrote in a note to Son Pham, which Mr. Ngo delivered to the boy, along with dozens of other letters of support and the toy plane.

Still, no one at Children's Bridge knew whether surgery was even possible. They had faced a setback in March, when a team of U.S. surgeons visiting Hanoi said local hospitals weren't equipped to support a complex surgery.

The group then pinned their hopes on two Canadian hospitals for children - one in Toronto and one in Halifax. In early May, the group received hopeful news. Doctors at The Hospital for Sick Children had given them the green light to send Son Pham to Toronto.

Sick Kids spokesperson Lisa Lipkin said yesterday that doctors will perform Son Pham's first tests next week.

"Over the next few weeks, a team from Sick Kids will evaluate his condition and determine what treatment is possible," she said.

A Sick Kids charity called the Herbie Fund, which provides children with operations not available in their home countries, will foot the surgery bill if doctors decide they can do it. A Vietnamese family living in Markham, a north-Toronto suburb, has agreed to host Son Pham and his nanny for the four months he will stay in Toronto.

"It's a little surreal," Ms. Maslen said. "It's wonderful he's here and that we're one step closer, but we're not quite there yet."