Carolyn overcomes throat tumour
July 5, 2010
Little Carolyn Puluku took the first easy breaths of her four-year life last week.
The Papua New Guinean girl with the gorgeous eyes was born with severe laryngeal papillomatosis, causing growths inside her throat and preventing air getting to her lungs.
And with her family living in the mining village of Porgera three hours from the nearest hospital in Port Moresby experts said her windpipe would have closed within a year.
Her condition was so bad that PNG doctors had cut a hole in her throat just to enable her to breathe.
She wore a plastic tube running from the base of her throat into her wind pipe for a year.
That all changed last week when surgeons from the Sydney Children's Hospital at Randwick gave her a clean bill of health after removing the growths.
The operation was made possible thanks to ROMAC, which paid around $20,000 tor the surgery and for Carolyn and her father, Wass, to fly to Australia.
'The doctors did a tremendous job and everyone has treated us like family', Wass said.
