Shunt Donation Project – I have shunts!!!!

If you’ve just jumped in, you can read more about my Shunt Donation Project (no. 6 on the List) here.

And if you’re wondering what this ‘F-List’ I keep banging on about is, you can read about that here.

Yessir, this is a good day.  A happy day.  This morning I received an email from Conor Mallucci at Alderhey Children’s Hospital (Mr Mallucci is the first neurosurgeon I contacted in this project) saying he had just spoken to a lady at Codman UK and that they had shunts for me.  He said that she would be very happy to speak to me directly and included her contact details.  So I called her immediately (Loiusa Doherty; very helpful, very friendly, very keen to assist).  She said she has a rare situation of a hospital having ordered too many shunts and that there are forty she is due to collect next week which I am welcome to have.  They are ‘Bactiseal’ shunts, which mean that they release antibiotics once implanted in the child for the first crucial month when infection rates are at their highest, which will be imperative in these countries where infection plays such a large and troublesome role in post-operative complications.  Needless to say, I couldn’t thank her nor Mr Mallucci enough.  I was bordering on sounding gushy so I restrained myself after thanking each about three times.  To Codman, it’s just some shunts they won’t use.  To me, it’s a child being saved from a horrible death with every donated shunt.  Now I just need to arrange collecting them from Codman the week after next and after that I am going to meet with Kim Nguyen Browne from the Vietnam Volunteer Network to personally give her some of the shunts.  The others I shall be sending to Mr Alrbright at BethanyKids in Kijabe.  I’ve had to work out how many go give each facility in relation to how many children they have which are in need of the shunts which has been harder to do but judging from what both Kim and Mr Albright have informed me about the situations of each facility, I think I shall be sending fifteen shunts to Go Vap Orphanage in Vietnam and the remaining twenty-five to Kijabe in Kenya.  I shall update more when I’ve finalised the details; I just wanted to quickly share the good news!