Osly St. Preux and his mother hopped on the back of a truck and rode for hours along rutted roads in northern Haiti before they finally arrived, barefoot, at the hospital run by nuns and often staffed by American volunteers.
When Osly, then 12, took off his shirt for a surgeon from Baltimore, the doctor couldn't believe what he was seeing. The tumor growing out of Osly's right armpit was enormous, a gnarled, bulbous mass larger than a grapefruit and getting bigger by the month.
Dr. Mojtaba Gashti knew almost immediately that he and his team, who every spring make a pilgrimage to Haiti to perform surgery, would not be able to save Osly - not there, in fairly primitive conditions in one of the poorest places on the planet.
The doctor looked into the boy's big brown eyes and saw his own young son, an American teenager who wanted for nothing. His heartstrings tugged, his head spinning with thoughts of how best to help, Gashti decided he had to bring Osly to the United States and make him well.
Gashti slogged through diplomatic red tape, lobbied his surgeon friends to donate their time and persuaded his hospital to approve the operation and help pay for it. And finally, last week Osly and his mother, Natalie Pierre, entered an airport for the first time, flew on an airplane for the first time, and made their way to Baltimore.
Tomorrow, Osly will have his sarcoma removed during a six-hour procedure at Union Memorial Hospital, where Gashti is chief of vascular surgery.
"We've seen so many people there - you can't bring everyone back," Gashti said. "Something about his smile and his face and his cap. ...
"Our hope is that it's not too late and we can resect it and cure it."
Gashti, 47, has been going to Haiti since 1994, when he was training at St. Barnabas Hospital in New York. One day in the on-call room, the Iranian-born Gashti got to talking with a junior resident, Dr. Renoir Eugene, who hails from Milot, a hamlet in the north of Haiti. They hatched a plan. What if they went to Eugene's homeland and put their new surgical skills to work on the needy villagers who can hardly afford food, let alone basic medical care?
The first trip happened that spring. The operating room at Hopital Sacre Coeur, just 12 beds at the time, had no air conditioning, no ventilation of any kind, flies buzzing all around. But they were able to do so much in those five days. Gashti has been returning ever since, taking a week's vacation, paying his own way, to work from early morning until late at night, doing as many as 67 surgeries in one trip.
