20325: (Hermantin) Sun-Sentinel-Haitian Girl Treated For Rare Blood Vessel Malformation (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Hospital's High-Tech Help


Haitian Girl Treated For Rare Blood Vessel Malformation

By GARRET CONDON
Courant Staff Writer
Posted March 12 2004

A 15-year-old Haitian girl unaccustomed to electricity and running water got
a taste of high-tech medicine this week at Hartford Hospital when Dr. Gary
Spiegel, the hospital's director of neuro-intervention, performed a
procedure to shrink a golf-ball-size growth that has been on the left side
of her mouth all her life.

Marie Joseph, from the impoverished village of Jourdain in southwestern
Haiti, had told Dr. Jeremiah Lowney, president of the Norwich-based Haitian
Health Foundation, that she wanted the protrusion treated so that she could
kiss her mother. Doctors expect she will get her wish when she returns to
Haiti this summer, although the treatment she underwent will cause the
tumor-like growth - actually a blood vessel malformation - to increase in
size before it starts to shrivel.

"The condition is quite rare," said Spiegel, who also is a physician with
Jefferson X-Ray Group.

Marie, who speaks only Creole, did not talk to reporters at a press
conference Thursday, but sat quietly in a wheelchair.

The Haitian Health Foundation, founded by Lowney in 1982, provides health
care to about 200,000 Haitians. Its main clinic is in the town of Jeremie,
and its work was only briefly disrupted by the recent civil unrest there.

Lowney said one of the foundation's health care workers in Marie's village
encouraged her to make the trip to Jeremie. Marie walked six hours in
borrowed shoes to visit the clinic. Lowney said it took nine months to
arrange for Marie to leave Haiti. The foundation took her to Norwich, where
she first was seen by Dr. Richard Martin, an oral and plastic surgeon at
William W. Backus Hospital. Martin, examining MRI images of the lesion,
realized that she could benefit from Spiegel's expertise and referred her to
Hartford Hospital. All of the care has been donated.

Spiegel, using precision imaging, injected the protrusion with alcohol,
which filled the abnormal blood-vessel pouches and burned the inside lining
of these vessels. This caused them to clot off and to begin scarring. "It
will come down in size," he said. A second treatment probably will be
required in six weeks, he said. Marie also will need surgery for the excess
tissue that remains. Spiegel said that doctors are only treating the
exterior, protruding section of the abnormal blood vessels, and that the
section remaining inside her mouth should not cause her problems.

Lowney said he plans to return to Haiti in May, but Marie probably will stay
in Norwich until the summer. In the meantime, Marie, who has had little
schooling, is learning English and making friends at Sacred Heart School in
the Taftville section of Norwich. The Norwich foundation is trying to raise
money to build a house for Marie and her family, who now live in a makeshift
hut.






Copyright © 2004, The Hartford Courant

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