Two-year-old girl gets kidney, a new lease on life

[okarol]

‘It’s been a miracle'
Two-year-old girl gets kidney, a new lease on life

Sean Gaffney
February 6, 2008 - 6:44PM

Little Millie is celebrating her second birthday next week outside the place she’s called home her entire life: Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi.

It’s where she learned her first word — mama — and then devised nicknames for her many nurses and doctors.

It’s also where she took her first steps in front of doctors on the cold floor.

And until last week, it’s where she’s spent her first two years without a kidney, surviving on a litany of treatments and catheter tubes.

Today, Millie and mom Islen Salinas — who’s been at her daughter’s bedside from the beginning — are preparing to say goodbye to the home they rather would’ve never known.

“It’s been very difficult … but we’re very excited,” said Millie’s father, Jose Martinez. “We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves yet; she might even have a birthday party here.”

Millie, or Milagros Salinas, was born with Infantile Polycystic Kidney Disease, which caused her kidneys to swell and constrict her lungs. Doctors were faced with removing Millie’s kidneys and subjecting her to four-hour dialysis treatments, five days a week.

Nearly 50 percent of children diagnosed with the disease die.

“The family were told (at another hospital) that this baby was going to die,” said Dr. Samhar al-Akash, one of Millie’s caregivers. There was no choice, so physicians at Driscoll removed her kidneys and started dialysis.

The dialysis regime was cumbersome and at times dangerous.

Weeks before her surgery, doctors were running out of sites to insert the tubes — a dangerous situation with complications that could lead to death. A vessel in her neck was the only place left to tap.

“This (was) her last access,” Al-akash said. “(The surgery) came really at the right time for her.”

The transplant, the first performed on a girl as young as Millie in the Rio Grande Valley, so far appears successful. The next three months, however, will be tenuous as Millie tries to ward off infections that could threaten the new kidney.

And then there’s the liver problem.

Doctors suspect she’ll need to replace that organ as well because of the disease. In 20 years, she’ll probably need another kidney, too, as is the case with most transplants.

For now, though, the family is hopeful.

While Mom was away at the hospital in Corpus Christi, Dad was at home with the other three sisters and working a full-time job in construction. He saw his wife on the weekends when she occasionally came home to Roma, and only occasionally had the chance to see Millie.

He was in Houston at a construction job waiting for the rain to pass when he got the call the transplant had worked.

“It’s been a miracle,” Martinez said. “I know there is a god, but (the doctors have) been doing his work for him.”

Sean Gaffney covers law enforcement and general assignments for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4434.

http://www.themonitor.com/news/millie_8822___article.html/doctors_kidney.html

PHOTO: Milagros Salinas, 2, of Roma, was born with Infantile Polycystic Kidney Disease and recently received a transplant after spending her first two years at Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi.