Melyssa Delgado Braga of Sao Paula, Brazil was diagnosed with a rare facial tumor. One that was so big that it was giving her breathing problems. The 3-year-old’s parents took to social media pleading for help and she and the family received the help they needed and flew to a hospital in Lousiana where they extracted the ginormous tumor from her sweet little face.
Dr. Celso Palmeieri Jr., assistant professor of oral and maxillofacial surgery at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center heard of Melyssa’s case while reading a post from a Brazilian news site. The child’s parents were looking for help to get their daughter to the U.S. so she could receive treatment.
“I was reading more about her story, I realized our department could probably help her, and particularly Dr. Ghali and his department,” says Palmieri to CNN. “I’ve seen him helping people so many times, so I took a screenshot of the child, and I texted it to him.”
Dr. Ghali, chairman of LSU Health reached out to Shreveport’s Willis-Knighton Health System, a nonprofit healthcare organization with a history of hosting international patients and rare surgeries. The organization provided the family with housing and took care of the cost of the hospital stay.
Melyssa was diagnosed with a myxoma, a very rare and aggressive tumor. “This is typically a benign tumor, non-cancerous, but it’s very locally aggressive,” explains Dr. Ghali. “This tumor has pretty much eaten away her entire jaw from one side to the other and has displaced her tongue, [She’s] really unable to eat pretty well. She was on her way to be a pretty malnourished child.”
He explains that myxomas are more common in females than in males and approximately 10% of these tumors are genetic. “These are called familial myxomas and are more likely to be numerous and occur in younger patients,“ she explained.
If the child had not received the surgery as soon as she did, more than likely she would’ve required a feeding tube and she was only a month away from her breathing being blocked. Unfortunately, patients that suffer from this, die a slow, progressive death from the combination of malnourishment and blocked airways.
Dr. Ghali, along with other surgeons donated their services in order to extract the 5-pound tumor. She explains that Melyssa’s breathing was so bad, that the tumor had pushed her tongue to the back of her throat. The doctors had to do a reconstruction of her tongue and since the surgery, she’s regained full use of her tongue. “When we were able to remove this tumor, the tumor weighed over 5 pounds on a child that probably doesn’t weigh more than 25 pounds herself, total weight,” says Dr. Ghali.
As you could imagine, the family is beyond grateful and happy that their daughter was helped by these generous doctors who performed this life-altering surgery.