Lovelette Brooks, Special Projects Editor

Denoy Ellis (left) and mother Christine Evans hope for an opportunity to get his heart fixed.- Norman Grindley/Deputy Chief Photographer

Denoy Ellis sports a cherubic smile, despite the worsening medical condition that has kept him out of school for a year. Most days he is weak and unable to walk the 12-mile journey from Comfort Hall to the Mizpah All-Age School in Manchester.

Diagnosed with congenital heart disease, there's not much that this teenager who enjoys a game of cricket can do. At the best of times, he can only walk a few metres before collapsing. In fact, it was a series of fainting spells at home that alerted his mother Christine Evans to his medical condition.

Fainting at intervals

"At around age seven, he just started fainting at intervals and actually could not walk. He was admitted to Mandeville Hospital, but his condition did not improve after he was released," she related.

"His doctor referred him to the Bustamante Hospital for Children in Kingston. After a series of treatments and going back and forth to the hospital, I decided to take him to the University Hospital. He was diagnosed as very sick, and admitted there," Ms. Evans continued, describing her experience as "rough and tough".

After weeks in the hospital, Denoy's doctors "Ramphal and Irvine," related Ms. Evans, told me that he needed open-heart surgery. "That was all they said. They gave me no time, because they said they did not have any space to accommodate him. However, one of the doctors, a professor, an elderly man, told me to buy a surgery kit and return. I did not get the kit because at a cost of $83,000, it was way too expensive for me," recounted the single mother of six.

Having appeared on local television appealing for help, Ms. Evans said she was advised to go and see Dr. William Foster. But before she went, Dr. Foster himself gave her a call.

"I was shocked, surprised and happy that a doctor really cared so much about my son to call. That was last October. He told me to come in and see him. On the very first visit with Denoy, he did all the necessary tests and confirmed that open-heart surgery was critical if Denoy was going to live, and that he would seek help for me in the United States," she said at her home deep inside rural Manchester.

Since October, life for Denoy and his mother has been fast-tracked. Mother and son, sometimes mother only when son is too weak to travel, journey from Comfort Hall into Kingston, sometimes three times per week. In between, there have been long telephone conversations between doctor and patient.

Just last week, Ms. Evans got very good news. Denoy has been booked for surgery at the St. Joseph Hospital in Peterson, New Jersey, where a team of doctors will do his surgery free of cost. The Gift of Life Foundation, a charitable organisation is funding their stay at a nearby hostel.

"If everything goes as planned, he will be admitted on April 16. We have been booked to leave the island on April 14. It is expensive, but I have to go with him, I can't let him go alone," Ms. Evans told The Sunday Gleaner.

Air fare for both of them is setting her back by $86,000. She is still struggling to put all the funds in place to make the journey. She is also worried that she may not be granted a visa to the United States.

"I am just praying and hoping and I know that Dr. Foster is working very hard to see that Denoy gets the hole in his heart corrected," she said.

'I was shocked, surprised and happy that a doctor really cared so much about my son to call.'