Testimony of Mia's mom

Gabriela Bonnin (Mom)
Date: 20/09/2007

I'm Mia Valentina's mom, Gaby Bonnin, I'm 19 years old, her dad is Carlos Ortiz, we have an incredible daughter that we couldn't believe the strenght she has and the way that she's fighting, because she wants to live and that's the reason to keep on standing up!!! She's only 8 months old (born 16/01/07) 11lbs of weight and she has a chronic disease in the intestine, that cause 6 operations and 9 enters to operating room with general anesthesic, now she lives with a colostomy and a vesicostomy (desviations of the small and large intestine and also the bladder to stomach). Her medical profile it's a visceral miopathy (intestine muscle's disease), that prevent a normal feeding in oral way, so she requires a special nutrition (parenteral feeding) that is given through a vein. The disease, in the long run also affect the liver. We don't have a lot of encouraging forecasts, because in our country we don't even had the analisys for diagnostication of the disease, and for that, we got to travel for a month to Buenos Aires city (Argentina), where pathologyc samples was analised.

Being in Buenos Aires, we contact with the Favaloro's Foundation, the transplant's pioneers in South America and one of the few centers in the world that do this kind of things. One of the biggests troubles with this is the extremely high costs of a transplant of that kind, and also the treatment that she needs to receive.

Because of this, we need to do a NATIONAL CAMPAIGN to let the people know about this case and get more people to help us because we really need that. From now and on, this is the first and most important step, and gonna open a lot of doors to Valentina with the help that we could receive. Now we are in the Paraguay Narional Hospital (IPS). Thank you for join to our crusade.