Vivian Pellas woke up to
the sound of her husband, Carlos, shouting her name. He was yelling for
her to follow him out of a burning aircraft.
“Vivian, sigame,” he said in Spanish. “Follow me.”
She
stumbled out of what was left of Servicio Aereo de Honduras flight 414
just moments before it exploded in a ball of fire and twisted metal and
screams. She couldn’t feel the 62 bone fractures or the skin melting off
her face.
The pilots of the
Boeing 727 had misjudged their approach to Tegucigalpa’s Toncontin
International Airport and slammed into a mountain. More than 130
passengers were killed. The Pellases were among the fewer than a dozen
survivors, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its December issue.
“I
remember a light and going through a tunnel, and suddenly I was outside
of the plane,” Vivian recalls. Carlos, who was also seriously burned
and lost parts of four fingers in the accident, led his wife to the
nearest road. They hailed a pickup truck, and the driver drove them two
hours down the mountain to a hospital in the Honduran capital.
Vivian
Pellas, who was 35 in 1989 when the plane crashed, underwent years of
skin grafts, surgeries and rehabilitation, depending initially on
morphine to alleviate the pain.
“My face broke off into pieces,” she says. “The morphine was so I didn’t die of shock from the pain. It was like I was in hell.”
Today, Pellas sports long red hair and has no visible scars on her face. She looks at least a decade younger than her 60 years.
Cuban Refugee
The daughter
of a well-to-do Cuban businessman who fled that country, Vivian Pellas
moved to Nicaragua when she was 7. She says she felt she had no mission
in life before the plane crash. She had married Carlos Pellas, now a
billionaire, when she was 22, and although she had a passion for dance,
she spent much of her time raising their three children.
As she
suffered through the treatments, she found a cause: She would start a
burn center for children in Managua. The facility, called the
Association for Child Burn Victims in Nicaragua, or Aproquen, opened in
1991. It has treated more than 11,000 patients, all free of charge, in
23 years and today also treats some adults.
To create economies
of scale and attract top-notch doctors, the Pellases built a
full-service medical facility, Hospital Metropolitano Vivian Pellas,
next door. It’s now one of five in Central America certified by Joint
Commission International, a hospital accreditation organization.
Children at Risk
Children
in developing countries are at higher risk of burns than in the
developed world and are seven times more likely to die from a burn,
according to the World Health Organization. In Nicaragua, child burns
usually involve kitchen accidents or piles of burning trash, a common
form of garbage disposal, says Dr. Ivette Icaza, the center’s head of
rehabilitation. Her unit runs a prevention program in which Aproquen
sends clowns into local schools with victims to teach their classmates
how to avoid and treat burns.
The burn center has
its own in-house seamstress, who stitches custom Lycra garments. Lycra
is used to compress and mold scar tissue, which can deform a victim’s
hands or feet while healing takes place around joints. Pellas wore a
Lycra garment over her head as she recovered and still wears one on her
arm.
The burn center’s co-founder and head of research is Dr.
Michael Carstens, a Stanford University-educated doctor who uses the
Nicaragua burn center as a laboratory to develop new stem cell–based
burn treatment therapies. He uses a patented process to separate stem
cells from a patient’s fat; the stem cell “liquor” is then injected
beneath scar tissue.
Stem Cells
“Stem cells can eat scar,” Carstens says. “They can become other cells. They reduce inflammation.”
While the type of device
Carstens employs to treat scars using fat stem cells has been approved
by European regulators, it hasn’t yet passed muster with the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration.
The Pellases have been the burn center’s
major benefactors and still contribute $3 million a year in cash,
personnel and equipment, according to Vivian Pellas. The family and
Carstens have started a drive to raise a $50 million endowment for the
center.
“We want to secure the future of all these children,” she
says. “When you have an accident, you promise everything to God. The
question is whether you keep the promise.”
Source: http://www.businessweek.com
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment