Dimka
Baby Dimka was born in January 2022 to Teofila, 31, and Marco, 34, who live as caretakers in a two-room home in the town of Yapacani outside Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Dimka spent her first week of life in an incubator due to unspecified breathing problems. Doctors in the small local hospital told her parents their baby had “a hole in her heart that would close on its own with time,” and sent them home with instructions to keep a close eye on her development. But when Dimka was around eight months old, Teofila noticed that Dimka’s mouth and hands were turning blue, and she was struggling even more than usual to breathe.
The local clinic referred the baby to the Hospital Japonés in Santa Cruz, where specialists diagnosed Dimka with an especially severe presentation of Tetralogy of Fallot, a constellation of four distinct congenital heart defects. She needed emergency surgery to implant a Blalock–Thomas–Taussig shunt to increase blood flow to her lungs. Such complex pediatric heart procedures are not performed at the public hospitals, so the family was sent to the Incor heart clinic. The cost of the surgery was beyond the family’s reach; Marco earns an average of around US$350 a month as a motorcycle taxi driver, and two-thirds of that income goes to feed their family of six. Marco and Teofila turned to Puente de Solidaridad for support through the Solidarity Bridge heart program, which helped expedite the surgery to save their baby’s life. Dimka underwent surgery and remained at the Incor for two and a half weeks until she was strong enough to return home to Yacapani with her grateful parents. Puente de Solidaridad and Solidarity Bridge will continue to support the family, as Dimka will likely need additional procedures in the coming years to correct her cardiac malformations in the hopes of allowing her to live a full life.