Serendipity Saves a Young Life

Tarabou and her father.

Dr John Wright a paediatric cardiologist from Auckland’s Starship Children’s Hospital, was one of 24 members of a cardiac surgical team who with support from the Friends of Fiji and the Rotary Club of New Lynn, NZ, had been in Lautoka Hospital for ten days, performing heart surgery on twelve children. On September 12 he was urgently summoned to attend an emergency situation at Nadi Airport where a child from Kiribati had arrived cyanosed and unconscious.

Seven year-old Tarabou Raubane was one of six children with heart problems, all from Kiribati, on route to India for open heart surgery, accompanied by a nurse and their parents. With Tarabou in no condition to travel further, the group resumed their journey, leaving Tarabou and her father at Nadi.

With no medical documentation, or diagnosis other than the reported “heart murmur”, Dr John administered oxygen and then drove Tarabou to Lautoka Hospital to revive her and stabilise her condition. An ultrasound showed that Tarabou had Tetralogy of Fallot (a congenital heart malformation that affects the route the blood takes around the heart) and was in need of urgent surgical help.

There was concern that the facilities in Fiji were insufficient to undertake the necessary complex surgery, and Tarabou was of course in no position to travel onward to India. The Starship medical team also felt it impossible ethically to leave the child in Lautoka when they had already been obliged to start medical treatment.

An urgent request was made to Rotary Oceania Medical Aid for Children NZ for acceptance of Tarabou as an emergency ROMAC patient, and to underwrite travel and medical costs for emergency treatment at Starship Children’s Hospital.

The Rotary network acted fast to approve this unusual case with Board acceptance within three days. Just one week later after visas and flights had been arranged, Tarabou and her father arrived in Auckland, to be met by the ROMAC NZ team, and members of the host Rotary Club of New Lynn.

Open heart surgery was performed by Dr Kirsten Finicure just three days later, and very quickly Tarabou was sufficiently recovered to be walking, laughing and smiling for a photograph.  

Fate also smiled when it put Tarabou, a NZ paediatric cardiology team, and ROMAC together to save a young life!

Tarabou now has opportunity to share her beautiful smile and live a full life as she grows up in Kiribati.

This story can only encourage us to put a hand on our own healthy heart, and know the life-saving difference we make as Rotarians, supporting the ROMAC programme.