10-year-old girl needs P800k for 3rd open heart surgery

Jamie Anne Cartas

MANILA, Philippines–Jamie Anne Cartas is not your ordinary 10-year-old girl. A consistent honor student, she was abandoned by her biological parents when she was a baby. Doctors also predicted that she would live for only five years after she was discovered to have congenital heart disease.

Jamie, however, defied the odds although she had to undergo open heart surgery twice. She now needs a third operation as doctors at the Philippine Heart Center have said that her arteries are too narrow for blood to flow freely and normally.

For this, she will need P800,000, an unheard of sum for her grandparents, Josefina and Arturo Cartas, who are the ones looking after her. Arturo, the breadwinner in the family, earns P75 a day as a pedicab driver.

“She also needs to undergo a cardiac CT angiogram immediately to determine the life span of her heart and to know how long her own life span is,” Josefina told the Inquirer.

Josefina can be contacted at 0943-6806134. Donations can be deposited either in her BPI account (Josefina Cartas/ account No. 8519300134) or BDO (No. 002360514187).