“I saw into her future.  That’s why I’m finally doing something about it.”  Wendy’s mom had postponed her 5-year-old daughter’s cardiac surgery since her diagnosis at 2 months of age. Doctors told her to hold off on the surgery until she was 6 months old. She returned, and they said wait a year. Then again another year.  “All the delays, I thought, it can’t be so bad afterall. So I stopped going,” explained Wendy’s mom Fedline on August 30, 2016, just before her surgery at Robert Reid Cabral Hospital in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

During most of her stay on the cardiology floor, Wendy is rapt in a video game. Beside her lay a neglected doll, unsurprisingly named “muñeca,” Spanish for “doll.” Back home in Los Frailes Segundo, just outside of Santo Domingo, Wendy’s grandmother is feeling the effects of neglecting the cardiac condition they both share. “Seeing my mom’s health decline these days, that’s what convinced me to bring Wendy back for the first time in 4 years. I thought, I don’t want that for my daughter. So here I am.”

Wendy entered the operating room at 9:45AM on a Tuesday to have her transitional atrioventricular canal repaired. She was placed on bypass at 11:22AM for a total of 74 minutes and underwent a successful and uneventful procedure. Wendy made it to ICU by 2PM, and graduated to the cardiology floor less than 20 hours later. About ICHF donors, staff, volunteers, and local partners, Wendy’s mom said, “I can’t put into words how grateful I am for everything that they do.”

Two-year-old Rancel  absolutely refuses to settle for one measly lap around the surgery floor corridors. There’s really no telling how long he’d wander if the matter weren’t up to the nurses trailing him. They cheerfully lugged his chest tube and infusion pump this way and that way for a whole two laps. Frankly, no one can keep up with the little rascal anymore.

But that vitality wasn’t always a reality for Rancel. In fact, his life was quite the opposite. “He’s always tired,” his mom María explains the day before surgery. The young boy’s heart condition was discovered earlier this year. And although it was no surprise to mom, whose older daughter underwent the same procedure Rancel soon would, her concern is palpable in the hours leading up to his operation.

María speaks carefully, guarded, her mind absorbed in something distant and worrying. And it seems at first like Rancel is mirroring mom’s mood, although her countless glances at him make it hard to be sure who is emulating who. After parting for a brief 4 hours, when Rancel had his partial atrioventricular canal successfully repaired by an expert team of ICHF volunteers and local staff, he was delivered to the ICU at 8:20PM on August 30th, 2016.

He’s apparently eager to catch up on lost time. Rancel hopped out bed at the first opportunity, less than 17 hours after leaving surgery. His mom is grateful and hopeful. “I’ve only met wonderful medical professionals here, and I have no doubt that Rancel will have a long and energetic life.”

The ICU is momentarily effervescent. Two-year-old Mileisy blows bubbles with adorable concentration. Tender smiles punctuate her strenuous exhales whenever she manages to launch a few bubbles into the air. Meanwhile, the two patients before her have graduated from bubbles to whistles and party horns. All are instruments of “play therapy,” toys that encourage patients to take deep breaths, a crucial part of recovery, but a painful thing to do after open heart surgery.

The last few days have been painful for some of the parents, too – certainly for Mileisy’s mom, Anairis. “I cried and cried while she was in there,” she admits about the six hours her daughter spent in the operating room, where surgeons successfully augmented her pulmonary artery. But Mom is collected now, on alert, her expression firm. “She’s a wild one. I have to really protect her from now on, more than I did before,” she says. It seems odd, because Mileisy is healthier now, stronger, so why protect her more? “I think that during her surgery – and heart surgery is no small thing – it was the closest I’d ever felt to losing her.”

A few hours later on the cardiology floor, Anairis makes it a point to express her many thanks to everyone who made her daughter’s medical care possible. Meanwhile, Mileisy is coloring, play therapy that encourages her to sit up. Despite herself, every time she glances at her daughter grinning into a coloring book, Anairis’ face discloses moments of genuine, if brief, delight and relief. Perhaps play therapy is as emotionally restorative as it is physically, and a bit contagious, too.