11-year-old girl with heart ailment needs to undergo surgery

Ricamae Presentacion

MANILA, Philippines — When Ricamae Presentacion was born in 2008, a routine test for newborn babies showed her to be suffering from congenital heart disease.

“I thought that it was normal for her to be purple after she came out. But the color became more pronounced a month later. Even then, she would let the milk drip from her mouth even though she had just drunk a small amount so I used a medicine dropper as an option,” Presentacion’s mother, Leonora Pama, told the Inquirer.

Philippine Heart Center doctors who saw the youngest of Pama’s five children recommended surgery but after several cardiac catheterization procedures, they said it was too risky to operate on her because there was too much pressure on her lungs.

Cardiac catheterization allows doctors to see how well the heart is functioning. It involves inserting a long and narrow tube called a catheter into a blood vessel in the arm or leg and guiding it to the heart with the aid of a special X-ray machine.

After the last procedure done in August 2019, doctors finally gave the go signal for the now 11-year-old Presentacion to undergo heart surgery. Her family was informed that the operation would cost P500,000, only half of which would be shouldered by the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. Pama and her partner, pedicab driver Federico Presentacion, asked Inquirer readers for help in raising the other half of the amount or P250,000.

Leonora Pama can be reached at 0929-7421727. Donations can be deposited in her Bank of the Philippine Islands account (#6246-3721-69). INQ