Rocio is eight years old and lives in the neighborhood called “Los Comunicadores” in Matamoros, the Mexican border city that sits just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville. She seemed to be a healthy child—bright, inquisitive, active—until she turned three years old. She quit growing, lost a lot of weight in a hurry—and her bones became fragile. She suffered repeated fractures, often from incidental contact.Her skeletal system, that lovely invention of God’s nature, had turned into a torture machine. She began to shrink in upon herself.
A group of evangelical Christian doctors discovered Rocio during a quick missionary trip to Matamoros. The circumstances of her life, the vibrancy of her spirit, the hopelessness of her case--it is hard to know what moves a group of people from observation to action. In any case, the missionary doctors wanted to save her. But their time was limited, as were their local contacts, and, in the end, they headed home, unable to do much of anything other than raising false hope.
The hard truth was that there is not much that can be done, not now. Rocio had been through the Mexican medical system and the doctors had in fact done good work. She had received a plethora of examinations at no cost to her family. It doesn’t seem that she has rickets, but there is a possibility that she has an metabolic disorder. Rocio is being afflicted by something that is extraordinarily complicated, something that would be very difficult to treat, even in the best of circumstances.
The circumstances of Rocio’s life have made such treatment an impossibility. Rocio’s mother, Enriqueta, is raising her three children alone. She works on a factory assembly line where she earns about a third of what is needed to feed, clothe, and shelter her family. At 26 years of age, Enriqueta is worn out.
Taking Rocio across town to a doctor’s visit is a journey of pain for the little girl, who only breathes with any comfort when she is sitting up.
My friend Dr. Marsha, a pediatrician from Brownsville, and I pay the little girl a visit. Marsha sat with her and gently lifted her arm. Rocio indicated where they had taken a bone biopsy from her collarbone. She quietly told Marsha, that, yes, she was in pain. Marsha then asked the mother about Rocio’s medical history. The mother answers perfunctorily, her gaze out beyond the small sadness of her yard.
When Marsha asked Rocio what she would like to do, her eyes lit up. “Go to school!” she says. Her mother, for the first time during the visit, smiles, “She knows how to read!” she proudly exclaims.
As we continued the visit, Rocio turned in her little wheelchair so that she could better see the neighborhood kids scampering up and down a tree. “Rocio loves to watch the kids play,” her older sister says, helpfully.
We take our leave, pro
mising to come back.Once in the car, Marsha sighs, “I doubt that she will live out the month. Did you notice how much trouble she was having breathing?”
Actually, I hadn’t noticed that. I was caught up in the luminosity of her eyes, when she spoke of looking forward to the opening of school, and in the brightness of her smile, as she watched the kids from next door act like monkeys.
“The people asked him, ‘What, then, are we to do?’” (Luke 3: 10)
(Photos by Michael Seifert and Marsha Griffin, MD)
