Brain Emergency
It happened out of the blue. No fall, no accident. Twelve-year-old Heng Maylinh complained of excruciating headaches, vomited several times, and collapsed unconscious. “I was so scared and felt completely lost,” recalls her mother, Por Sotan, thinking back on those dramatic hours in the intensive care unit at our children’s hospital in Siem Reap. The diagnosis revealed that her daughter had a congenital vascular malformation in her brain that had ruptured, causing a life-threatening brain hemorrhage.
The situation was slightly different for 14-year-old Say Vichetra, who had been struggling with recurring headaches for months – until his legs suddenly went numb and could no longer support him. The diagnosis also came as a shock to his parents, his mother Sorn Srey Nea and his father Say Kimsek: a tumor measuring four by five by six centimeters had grown in their son’s brain. “I thought, ‘Now our Vichetra is going to die,’” his father recounts. Expensive medical treatment? Unaffordable for the farming family.
At the children’s hospital in Siem Reap, neurosurgeon Dr. Ratanak Ven took on the fight to save both of their lives – free of charge for the families. In hours-long, highly precise surgeries, he succeeded in stopping Maylinh’s brain hemorrhage and completely removing Vichetra’s tumor. Just six hours after the first surgery, Maylinh opened her eyes and spoke again. “Now I have my baby back,” says her mother through tears of relief.
Today, months after the surgeries and intensive physical therapy, the children are doing well and return to the hospital regularly for checkups. Maylinh is climbing around again, helps her mother with cooking, and wants to become a lawyer when she grows up. Vichetra has also been back in school for quite some time. His big dream: He wants to become a doctor himself one day to save other people’s lives.
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