Long Island Hospital Gives New Life to West African Girl With 6-Pound Tumor

A 12-year-old Gambia came to America with a scarf covering her face, but will return home proudly showing off her smile after surgeons at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park successfully removed a six-pound tumor from her jaw.

Janet Sylva’s mother Phillomena Sanyong first started noticing the tumor about three years ago. She hoped it would go away on its own, but it instead eventually evolved into a deadly benign tumor that impacted her life in more ways than one.

“Janet’s personality began to disappear,” Sanyong said in a press release. “She became withdrawn from her friends.”

Dr. David Hoffman, Director of the Division of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at Staten Island University Hospital, said Sylva was trapped in her own body. “Had this tumor been left untreated, Janet would certainly have starved to death,” he said. “The size and location of the tumor were affecting her ability to breathe and eat.”

Sanyong first brought her daughter to a hospital in Senegal, but doctors there were unable to provide treatment. They instead reached out to international health groups such as Healing the Children. Healing for Children’s Florida chapter posted Sylva’s picture on their website, which was seen by Hoffman. The doctor responded to the health group and said he would try to assemble a team to treat the girl.

Hoffman got Elissa Montanti on board. Montanti, president of the Global Medical Relief Fund, a Staten-Island based charity arranged to bring Sylva and her mother to America. After that, doctors, surgeons and nurses at Cohen Children's Medical Center came together to treat Sylva.

Before the operation took place, the team of surgeons used a “virtual surgery,” which visualized the tumor on a computer and then subtracted or removed from the facial skeleton. This visualization used surgical guides that would make the procedure more efficient.

Sylva underwent a 12-hour surgery on January 2017 where the tumor, which was the size of a small melon, was removed from the jaw. “Nobody knew that a tumor could reach that size,” Hoffman said.

Her jaw was then reconstructed with a graft from her lower leg bone. The bone was harvested with some of its attached muscle, as well as artery and veins that supply its blood, and connected to the arteries and veins in her head and neck.

Sylva stayed at Cohen for monitoring after the surgery and then started rehabilitation treatment, which included daily tasks like breathing correctly and re-learning how to speak and eat.

“This was a girl who came to us with a scarf covering her neck,” Hoffman said. “She wouldn’t look us in the eye, and she wouldn’t remove the scarf. Now, she’s running around, playing with other children, eating and smiling. She is coming back to herself.”

The 12-year-old, whose native language is Wolof, used a translator to thank all her “angels” who had a part in her life-saving surgery. She now looks forward to returning home to West Africa to attend to school to learn how to be a doctor.

Sylva and her mother will soon return to Gambia, but this time, she will be traveling without the scarf that she once refused to remove from her neck.

“I’ve already thrown it away,” the girl’s mother said.

Images via Cohen Children’s Medical Center:

• Photo 1:Posing together before the trip home to Gambia are (from left to right) : Phillomena; Janet; Elissa Montanti; translator About Diakhate; Dr. Armen Kasabian; and Dr. David Hoffman
  
• Photo 2: Janet greeting well-wishers at Cohen Children’s Medical Center