A doctor in Managua told Marbelyng her son had forty minutes left. Two years later, in an early childhood stimulation room in El Ayote, Omar is pulling himself up to walk.
Marbelyng Carmen Velásquez counts her son’s life in the things he can do now that he couldn’t do before. He sits up. He crawls. He holds onto his walker and moves across the room. Each one arrived later than the books say it should, and each one arrived after someone told her it never would.
Born at six months
Omar Gabriel was born at 24 weeks, six months into a pregnancy that should have lasted nine. He spent his first weeks in neonatal care. Two months after Marbelyng finally brought him home, he collapsed.
“He was like dead in the house,” she says. She got him to the health unit in El Ayote. The doctor there took one look and sent them on to the hospital in Juigalpa, the departmental capital of Chontales. Omar stayed there for a month. From Juigalpa hospital he was sent to cardiology at La Mascota Hospital, the national children’s hospital in Managua.
That is where a doctor told Marbelyng her son had forty minutes to live.
“When they gave me that news, I felt the worst thing a mother can feel, because I had just come from fighting for a month in the hospital.”
Three options
The forty minutes passed. Omar was still breathing. He was taken back to Juigalpa hospital, still alive, and eventually discharged, not because he was well, but because no one could say what was wrong with him.
The pediatrician who had grown attached to Omar laid out three options for his mother. Keep him on oxygen. Take him home, knowing he might not survive the trip. Or send him back to La Mascota Hospital.
Marbelyng chose La Mascota Hospital. Another month on oxygen. This time, the studies came back with answers: pulmonary hypertension, congenital heart disease, congenital hypothyroidism. After more than a year of not knowing, she finally had the names of the things her son was living with, Marbelyng finally had the names.
Names, however, are not treatment. Omar had survived. What he needed next was something no hospital transfer could give him: the slow, repetitive, daily work of learning to move.
What actually happens in an early childhood stimulation room
Omar was one year old when AMOS opened the stimulation room at the health center in El Ayote, a space equipped for early childhood development, staffed by people trained to work with children whose milestones are not arriving on schedule, and to put the exercises in the hands of their parents.
Marbelyng started bringing him immediately. At thirteen months, Omar sat up on his own for the first time. Then he crawled. Now he crosses the room in his walker.
“I have no complaints about the care. They’re very attentive with Omar. They’ve watched him grow.”
The part that happens at home
El Ayote is not a short trip for everyone who uses that stimulation room, and there are weeks Marbelyng can’t make it twice. So she does the exercises at home, the way the staff taught her.
That is the quiet design of the place: it is not only where Omar is treated. It is where his mother was trained.
A specialist once told Marbelyng her son had forty minutes. She now measures him in things he can do that he couldn’t do last year.
“This is a little miracle God gave me,” she says, “to keep going with him.”
The early childhood stimulation room in El Ayote exists because AMOS supporters funded it. It is open to every family in the municipality whose child needs it, and to mothers like Marbelyng, who make the trip twice a week because they can see it working.