GEORGE TOWN, Fri: An odd-job worker from Taiping slowly lifted up the pyjamas top of his son to reveal a neat incision mark from between the collar bone down to the solar plexus where a thick wad of gauze is plastered over.

To the 23-month-old Ng Yong Seng the surgery performed on him four days ago had given him a chance to lead a life as normal as any child deserves.

His father Poh Kee would not have been able to afford the surgery, having to support his wife and two other children with his meagre earnings of RM 800 per month.

The family is staying with Poh Kee’s brother who is also helping them financially.

The surgery, carried out at the Penang Adventist Hospital (PAH), was made possible with the sponsorship of a world community service programme, the Gift Of Life, under the auspices of the Penang Rotary Club (PRC).

Yong Seng was born with a hole in the lower chambers of the heart. As a result, oxygenated blood mixes with deoxygenated blood in the adjoining chamber, causing the heart to overwork.

This condition results in damage to the lungs, leading to breathlessness, poor feeding and slow weight gain in most child patients.

Next on the list of scheduled heart surgeries under the programme are Vibarjita Kumaramanivel, six, aand Hepshibah Jayabalan, aged three-and-a-half.

Vibarjita’s parents, Kumaramanivel Subramaniam and R. Indrani, from Kedah, take home about RM1,150 per month as factory workers.

She has a younger sister K. Kamales, five, and hope that the surgery on May 9 will enable her to join in the games her classmates play in school.

"Vibarjita’s heart has a hole in the wall between the upper chambers of the heart and the "hole" may be closed with a "patch" of the patient’s own tissue or with a synthetic material," said PRC president Nutan B. Shah.

Hepshibah’s mother, supermarket cashier Glory Pamela, is single-handedly raising her and a younger brother, aged two, with her monthly income of RM 450, since Glory’s separation from her husband.

Hepshibah had undergone a palliative surgery at the hospital in September 1998 and it has enabled her to survive till now to take another surgery to correct the transposition of the two big arteries of the heart, the aorta and the pulmonary arteries.

Nutan said Gift Of Life is a programme that tries to "ensure no one should die because they have no financial means to obtain treatment".

As such, we have established two 'arms' for the programme... one to provide kidney dialysis facilities and the other to enable children with heart problems, aged 14 and below, to receive free heart surgeries," he added.

Heart surgeries are carried out as a joint project between PRC and the hospital which provides medical services at substantially subsidised fee.

It has to date provided open heart surgeries to 16 Cambodian children, two Indonesian children and three Malaysian children, amounting to some RM 250,000 with the hospital subsidising some RM 100,000.