Five-year-old Wood lives in Haiti with his mother and father. His father is an electrician and his mother stays at home. Wood started preschool this year and likes playing with his friends, singing, and drawing.
Wood was born with two abnormalities in his heart: he has a hole between the two lower chambers of his heart called a ventricular septal defect and, in addition, he has a malformation of his aortic valve that allows blood to leak backward through it. Together, these conditions mean that Wood’s blood does not obtain the oxygen it needs, and also does not circulate well through his body. This leaves him feeling sickly and weak, and will eventually cause heart failure. Both conditions can be fixed during surgery.
$1,500 raised by Watsi donors will help fund Wood’s open-heart surgery. Have a Heart Cayman Islands, an organization that partners with local and international organizations to subsidize and provide life-saving heart surgeries to children based on financial need, is subsidizing an additional $10,000.
“We are excited for Wood to have this surgery because he cannot keep up with his friends and gets tired very easily,” his mother shares. “We hope he will be more normal afterwards!”