LV doctors bring smile to Filipino boy’s face

Friday, July 1, 2005 | 11:10 a.m.

Nine-year-old Eleazar De Vergara is a "mini-celebrity" among students and dentists at the UNLV School of Dental Medicine.

On Thursday morning he was on the school's Shadow Lane campus for some dental work. Females fawned over him, the dean of the school, Pat Ferrilo, made a special stop to greet him and even office workers sought him out to catch a glimpse of one of his sweet, shy smiles.

The positive attention is a major change for De Vergara, who only a few weeks ago was being teased and socially ostracized in his small rural village in the southern part of the Philippines because of a large growth covering the right side of his nose, University of Nevada School of Medicine's Dr. John Menezes said.

The birth defect, called frontonasal encephaloceles, was caused when his skull didn't properly form, leaving a small hole where his nose and skull bones meet, Menezes, a craniofacial plastic surgeon, said. The hole allowed part of his brain matter to seep out and settle on his face.

The defect is rare but more common in Southeastern Asian countries, Menezes said.

Menezes met De Vergara on a medical mission to the Philippines in February 2004 and spent the last year-and-a-half working with the mission's organizers and other local doctors to bring the boy to Las Vegas to remove the growth and get the other medical care he needed. Now two weeks after surgery, De Vergara's trip to the dentist Thursday was to help improve the smile that now regularly flashes across his face, Menezes said.

"I've really seen him sort of brighten up since the surgery," said Menezes, whose fiancee, Dr. Jaleh Pourhamidi, arranged and is paying for De Vergara's dental care as an orthodontist at the dental school.

"In his village he is no longer called by his name, he is called by a colloquial name which essentially means 'tumor boy,' " Menezes said. "I asked him if he actually answered to that and he said he does."

Because the growth was attached to De Vergara's frontal lobe, Menezes said he couldn't operate on the boy when he first met him.

De Vergara's condition demanded that a neurosurgeon take part in the surgery in order to avoid the high possibility of damaging the brain in removing the growth, Menezes said.

Menezes was in the country with the Las Vegas Philippines Medical Mission, Inc., founded by Filipino natives Frank and Minda Banaria, and the "hospital" they were working out of was a small four-room clinic with two make-shift operating rooms. Frank, a Metro police officer, and Minda, a UMC nurse, have been taking medical teams to the Philippines every February for the last five years.

There is little access to health care in the rural part of the country, both Menezes and Minda Banaria said, and De Vergara's family would never have been able to afford to pay for care even if they had access to it.

The youngest of five, De Vergara's mother is deceased and his father, described as a "jack-of-all-trades," is currently out of work, the boy's translator and temporary guardian, Malou Albano said. De Vergara's father had to borrow money to bring him to Manila in order to come to Las Vegas.

Minda Banaria's niece and a medical doctor in the Philippines, Albano helped work with De Vergara's family and Filipino authorities to help bring him to the United States, It was the second time they had brought a child back to Las Vegas for care, Banaria said, but it still took the entire last year-and-a-half and the intervention of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to get De Verga here on medical visa.

As Banaria and Albano worked on bringing De Vergara to the United States, Menezes worked to arrange for the actual treatment.

Menezes convinced his colleagues, neurosurgeons Dr. John Anson and Dr. Stuart Kaplan, to scrub in with him on the case, and convinced Sunrise Children's Hospital to donate the operating room, all of the supplies, and to take care of all the pre-operative and post-operative care for De Vergara.

Other local doctors, including pediatricians Dr. Diane Lipscomb and Dr. Beverly Neyland, a school of medicine professor, and opthalmologist Dr. Paul Casey also have helped with De Vergara's care. Everyone involved in De Vergara's case donated their time and services.

Menezes, part of a craniofacial specialist team in Las Vegas, said the team approach was critical to the the surgery's success, and that everyone he asked jumped at the chance to help De Vergara.

"Everybody, immediately upon seeing his photo, their heart went out to the child," Menezes said. "Everyone volunteered without a second of hesitation."

It took about five hours to extract the growth, but De Vergara was out of the hospital after just one day, Menezes said. Every doctor involved in his care said he has been the ideal patient.

Sitting in the dental chair Thursday, where most children would be stiff and scared, the unfathomably quiet 9-year-old was cheerfully playing with the seat's control's, moving it up and down. He and Pourhamidi then used two of the dental tools as squirt guns as they waited for the anesthetic gel to do its job.

Through a translator, De Vergara says he's just happy to be here. He did admit he was eager to get back to watching cartoons at Banaria's house, where he and Albano are staying. Television is a luxury he doesn't have back home.

De Vergara needs to have at least three teeth extracted and several cavities filled, which third-year-dental student Leena James is taking care of, Pourhamidi said. Pourhamidi plans to send De Vergara home with a massive supply of toothbrushes and toothpaste, enough for all of his village. She has also set him up with some new clothes and school supplies.

When he returns home De Vergara will also have a new pair of glasses, ophthalmologist Dr. Paul Casey said. The growth obstructed his right eye, causing it to be smaller than his left and to have an irregular cornea, limiting his vision.

The glasses will protect his one good eye, but also make his smaller right eye appear normal, Casey said. By the time he does go home, he'll be almost a completely new boy.

"It's life changing to have a disfigurement like that treated and to be accepted back into society," Casey said.

Menezes, the Banarias and others involved in De Vergara's case are now trying to bring an 18-year-old girl with the same condition over next.