First published in the Herald Sun, 14 January 2017

Words by Grant McArthur

Ramalia Borges flew home last week with two new heart valves and a renewed chance at life she could barely imagine in her remote East Timor home.

Suffering rheumatic heart disease, the 15-year-old’s heart barely sustained her and she was lethargic and dizzy to the point of seeing two images of her mother standing in front of her.

But, after being brought to Australia by the East Timor Heart Fund for an exhaustive operation at the Royal Children’s Hospital, “Alia” now dreams of becoming a doctor herself.

Alia and her mother, Octavia, made their way to the East Timor Heart Fund’s clinic last March following a tough journey from their mountain hamlet. It was found that an untreated infection early in life had attacked both the mitral and aortic valves.

In Australia the condition would have been overcome with simple monthly antibiotics, but it consigned Alia to slow death in the coming two years.

The Melbourne-based charity began crowd-funding for the $20,000 needed to bring Alia to the specialised care of the RCH.

When she arrived, Professor Yves d’Udekem found Alia’s ventricle was enlarged with vast amounts of blood flowing the wrong way into her heart.

“You have to operate before the heart gets too weak, because if you wait too long then you don’t have a full recovery of the heart muscle,” Prof d’Udekem said.

Two days before Christmas Alia’s heart was clamped off and stopped for more than three hours while Prof d’Udekem used Alia’s own tissue to rebuild and repair the valves.

While the procedure typically improves patients’ lives, it does not always have a perfect result, often leaving smaller amounts of blood continuing to flow the wrong way.

But, in Alia’s case, the result was stunning.