Family has hope for toddler fighting for life
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By NELLIE KELLY World Staff Writer
5/31/2002
Esperanza para Carlos
Carlos Saldivar smiles at his
mother, Maria G. Del Rio. Carlos just had surgery to lower his kidney and is
awaiting an experimental rib transplant. A tube in his throat helps him
breathe.
Below: Carlos Saldivar kisses his mother, Maria G.
Del Rio, during a doctor's visit Thursday as pediatric surgeon Richard Ranne, who has performed surgery on the toddler, looks on.
Photos by DAVID CRENSHAW /
Carlos Saldivar communicates well, despite the fact
that he can't talk.
The 2-1/2-year-old blows kisses and grins whenever his dad enters the room.
When his mother isn't paying him enough attention, he jumps and grabs her shirt
until she picks him up.
He pushes Hot Wheels, his favorite toys, as any little boy would. And his eyes
widen when he sees his doctor's collection of model cars.
A smile rarely leaves his face.
His father's dream is for more of his son's personality to shine through, and
that means weaning him from the breathing machine and fixing a variety of health
problems.
“I want to have him by me," Pompeyo Saldivar Munoz said. "I want to
take him and my older son to play baseball or tennis. We go to the park for 30
minutes and stay three hours."
But Carlos' condition doesn't allow him to participate in the same activities
as other children his age.
He was born with dwarfism, small ribs and a hole in his heart.
His intestines were twisted in his chest, where one of his kidneys was, too.
He spent the first year of his life at
The Tulsa World wrote about him when he celebrated his first birthday in the
pediatric intensive care unit.
After that, he remained in the hospital for a month.
But a little more than a year later, a lung infection landed him back in the
hospital for two more months starting in December.
He has undergone seven surgeries to fix his heart, intestines and a
diaphragmatic hernia.
Dr. Richard Ranne performed the most recent surgery
May 14 to lower a kidney out of Carlos' chest.
Ranne decided to handle the surgery in
Surgeons in
Most children with the rare rib deformity die from asphyxiating dystrophy, a
slow suffocation because the ribs don't grow fast enough to allow a patient to
breathe, Ranne said.
The metal ribs, which are still in the research phase, are only available in
The new ribs will be attached to Carlos' own rib cage. They would be widened
periodically to stretch Carlos' ribs.
After the surgery -- perhaps in the next few months -- Carlos should be able to
breathe without assistance.
His parents carry a ventilator and oxygen tank that provide the child air, but
Carlos no longer requires the machine to take breaths for him.
He can go without it for an hour; eventually, he may no longer need it, Ranne said.
But the latest kidney surgery presented the family with an ethical decision
regarding how many operations to allow for Carlos.
"Their quandary was when do we say he's had enough operations or should we
proceed with another heroic operation," Ranne
said. "So in some ways it was a moral decision."
The family, which includes four older children, including two who live at home,
has always made balanced decisions in the best interest of their child, Ranne said.
"For us to have him united us," Carlos' father said. "Before
him, it was just me or her. Now we're together.
It's all of us," he said, "the whole family."
Their 14-year-old daughter wants to take her baby brother for walks without his
equipment, and 8-year-old Louis worries at school about the younger boy,
especially when he's sick.
Taking care of a seriously ill child can be stressful, but the family keeps
"esperanza," Saldivar
Munoz said.
That's Spanish for hope.
"Since the day he was born, we've been going day by day with esperanza -- hoping and having faith," he said.
Carlos' mother and father have simple dreams, but they're difficult to achieve.
They don't care whether Carlos is rich or well-known, said his mother, Maria G.
Del Rio.
"We don't want to be famous," Saldivar
Munoz said.
"The only thing we ask is for him to be OK. No other thing."