Another lovely story reblogged from "Through My Porthole". I had the same experience in Sierra Leone, wondering when a marvelous young man was going to have surgery, only to discover he already had!
I completely underestimated the emotional impact of meeting the
Malagasy teenager who has my plasma pumping through her veins. Suddenly
my experiences with Mercy Ships went to a whole new level of personal
investment. While volunteering and paying for the privilege is no
longer a surprise, the opportunity to donate my own blood to one of our
patients touched me deeply.
My heart went out to Seraphine when I finally met her a few days
after her surgery. I had to ask her nurse if Seraphine already had the
operation she came for.
You see, Seraphine is one of the patients that we helped surgically,
but not as much as we hoped to. She has a benign tumour covering her
facial nerves. If our surgeons had removed the complete growth it would
have threatened and probably seriously diminished her ability to eat,
drink and speak. In consultation with Seraphine and her Mum, while a
great weight was lifted from her face, some of the benign tumour was
left.
Like most of our patients, Seraphine came to the hospitalship hoping
for a perfect outcome. She desperately wished the humiliating tumour
which brought her so much ridicule would be completely removed from her
life. But we couldn’t do it without destroying the quality of the life
she has.
I told Seraphine because we shared the same blood, that we are like
sisters. It was apparent from her very timid responses and fearful
attempts to make eye contact that she has suffered greatly from
rejection. She didn’t expect kindness from strangers.
As I spent time with her, I thought of our own daughter who
developed a cyst over her eye when she was a baby. The local New
Zealand hospital popped it out before she was even a year old. If we
weren’t from a country with easily accessed and free/ affordable
healthcare, this could easily have been our daughter; with a disfiguring
cyst that shattered her sense of self worth.
Seraphine was treasured and nurtured by the crew during her weeks of
recovery on board. This 15-year-old will never be classically pretty, or
even ‘normal’ looking. She doesn’t have a happily-ever-after story. But
gentle, sweet Seraphine is dearly loved – by her Mum, and by us, and we
hope she understands most of all that she is precious to God. Would you
pray with me – just for a minute – that she does?
Africa
Mercy crew members from all over the globe donated
171 units of blood
to our patients during this field service
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