Help Daniela back to Good Health

If you’re feeling like blessing a beautiful soul today, look no further! Daniela is a young lady whom we’ve known and love for years in Mexico. She’s a giggly, Pictionary playing, trickster who has been fighting a long list of health battles the last 9 weeks. Think about her. Pray for her. She has blessed so many people in her short life and we can’t wait to see what God does through her in the future!

Many of you are aware that our 15 year old Daniela is in grave medical condition. She is our daughter, a part of our Beautiful Gate Orphanage Family for special children.

We come to you in this time of need as our precious Daniela has been suffering as she continues cycling between improvements then changing to grave complications bringing her to near death. Emotionally for us it has been a stressful roller coaster ride these last two months.

As our friends, family, and people who love and care about her and our family... Go Fund Me Support is one way you can help Daniela, and the loving children and caregivers, as our lives have been upended. Medical costs are mounting.  We pray you’ll help with the accumulating expenses. So many of you would love to do something tangible yet the distance we know prevents it.  This is a way for you to gather around Daniela and the Beautiful Gate Family, making that happen together from many locations around the world.

Prayers for wisdom and discernment and for Daniela to be kept comfortable and feeling the love we all have for her.  We desire for the Lord to touch her to be healed and to accept His Will should he want to take her unto Himself for complete healing. 

Here is more Background Information:

Daniela has always struggled with having an appetite and it is a challenge to get her to eat anything. Thus all her life she has suffered from malnutrition.  Due to her low weight, it was necessary to put in a feeding tube. 

She entered the social service hospital (no expenses) March 4th.  During the feeding tube surgery it later became apparent something went wrong and was causing leakage into her body cavity.  She was rushed into emergency surgery by the only pediatric surgeon in their system March 18th, which was unsuccessful and thus another emergency surgery was performed two days later. Since then her condition has been a constant roller coaster. The infection in her body cavity continued to get worse. The same doctor performed another (3rd) emergency surgery where they finally found the problem, a tear in the intestines.  She was getting better when her feeding tube broke it’s seal pouring gastric acids into her again.  The (4th) emergency surgery was performed sadly needing to remove the feeding tube she desperately needs and closed the incision.  She survived this and as a fighter she began to improve when approximately 6 days later another leak became apparent caused from a tear of the esophagus at the stomach due to the needed insertion of a feeding tube via her nose by the same surgeon.

We all believed she was slowly dying there, surgery mistakes made, and she for sure would die.  We made the decision to move her to a private hospital to have the best medical care possible where a team of doctors and specialists performed the complicated 6 hour surgery.  The Doctors had informed us that she will die without the surgery and even after having the surgery, there is a slightly greater chance of her passing than surviving.  While cleaning her they found 2 infections in her body cavity not found by the previous surgeon and they repaired the esophagus tear.  A day later her heart and breathing stopped twice needing CPR which she responded to and was placed on a breathing machine.  Again after some days of improving she then got pneumonia in her left lung yet with God providing Trisha, a respiratory therapist at the exact moment needed, Daniela recovered from the pneumonia.  She had a tracheotomy due to reaching the max time on the assisting breathing tube and we were preparing to receive her home that Friday!!  She was laughing on Wednesday.

Yet later Thursday she spiked a fever briefly and had developed another leak into her body cavity from a prior surgical closure of a body drainage tube 3 weeks earlier.

None of us including the doctors anticipated nor knew that with years of being malnourished Daniela’s internal tissues would be very thin & fragile and are just unable to heal properly. 

Daniela is weak, tired, & frail and was not be able to withstand another major surgery.  The doctors a week ago Saturday used only minimal invasive ways to treat her, and we all have been praying her body will respond and not turn septic.

This week she got another bacterial infection in her respiratory system and a fungus found it’s way into her blood stream... both very serious complications that are being attempted to be treated.

She is in our Lord's hands and our prayers are for her to not have pain or suffering.  It appears her body is struggling more than normal to heal itself due to the abuse it has suffered from her long bouts of malnutrition throughout her life.

Malnutrition Information:
Following is information regarding the side effects and ramifications of severe malnutrition.  Daniela was with us before and had almost reached her ideal weight when we had to return her to her family.  When she was again removed from her family, she had lost all the weight she had gained plus more:

Malnutrition signs and symptoms of under nutrition include:

.  lack of appetite or interest in food or drink

.  tiredness and irritability

.  inability to concentrate

.  always feeling cold

.  loss of fat, muscle mass, and body tissue

.  higher risk of getting sick and taking longer to heal

.  longer healing time for wounds

.  higher risk of complications after surgery

.  depression

In more severe cases:

.  breathing becomes difficult