Each of these men had to walk a long hard road, paved with blood, sweat, and tears, to arrive at this moment, embracing each other as both patient-physician and colleague-colleague.
From his birth in a powerless, waterless village in Ethiopia 41 years ago, Mesfin Yana has often found himself at the mercy of the kindness of strangers; strangers like Jim Kauten, a cardiothoracic surgeon who first met Mesfin when he was wheeled into his Atlanta operating theater for open heart surgery.
This incredible tale of compassion and gratitude, documented by the Washington Post, reminds us all of the miracles that can come from just caring a little to help a young impoverished soul.
Msefin, according to the Post, was surrounded by love and wanted for nothing in his home country, but a cough that started just by slowing him down turned into rheumatic fever. Staggering into Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in Addis Ababa, the scrawny youngster met American doctor Rick Hodes.
Hodes, the Post reports, is credited with saving thousands of children with heart disease through his own generosity and a series of clever fundraising strategies to pay for surgery on the poorest among them.
Children’s Cross Connection International paid for Mesfin to fly to Atlanta to undergo open heart surgery at Piedmont Heart Institute. There, Dr. Kauten successfully repaired the boy’s mitral valve to improve his heart function, and recommended he stay with his host family nearby while he recovered.
His host happened to be a dentist, and seeing as how Mesfin would soon be back on his way to Ethiopia, recommended he take advantage of his surroundings and get his wisdom teeth pulled. This, after the young man returned to his family to tears of joy, actually developed into another heart problem called endocarditis, which Mesfin believed was certain to claim his life—even as he once again lay on Dr. Hodes’ physician’s table in Addis Ababa.
Both Christian men, Mesfin was happy to chalk his misfortune up to God’s will; Dr. Hodes was not. The American sent his patient back to Atlanta for a second surgery. God only knows who funded this time.
The diagnosis was that a valve repair wasn’t enough: it had to be replaced with a mechanical one, which meant he would have to live in the US where blood thinners and monitoring were readily available.
It was at this time that he encountered the startling kindness of another stranger: Allen Dollar. Mesfin’s cardiologist, Dollar was also the adopted father to many children, and took Mesfin under his roof as well.
“I’m always grateful,” Mesfin told the Post. “I’m grateful for my family, for just being in the United States. It’s a resurrection for me. You know, I was once lost, dead, and I was resurrected and I’m living a new life.”
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Resurrected, as he describes it, Mesfin Dollar threw himself into his studies, training to become a health care professional at Georgia State University. It’s there he met his wife Lyerusalem, with whom he has two children.
Mesfin would eventually move his family to Texas where he trained to become a perfusionist at the Texas Heart Institute before eventually getting a job at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he operates the heart-lungs machine for patients undergoing open-heart surgery in some of the most complex cardiac procedures.
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One can imagine it didn’t take much for him to make room in his schedule to return to Ethiopia to do surgeries through the nonprofit Heart Attack Ethiopia. On the first surgery mission trip a couple of years ago, Mesfin surprised Dr. Jim Kauten, who was also there at the time.
“That was especially nice in my mind,” Kauten said. “For him to be able to pay back to his community services that he received in the United States, and he was able to pay it back in Ethiopia.”
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As well as providing a key service in the operating theater, the native Amharic-speaker acts as the social glue between volunteer surgeons and patients, children like he once was, unable to understand or talk to his benefactors. His translations help put the patients at ease and stich both sides of the volunteer team together.
Mesfin has since relocated his family to the US, where they live together in what must be one of the most grateful family units in the country.
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