Burn victim Pippie Kruger clung to Dr Ridwan Mia’s finger. She looked like a little bird in her fluffy yellow dressing gown and cried softly as she was wheeled towards the ambulance, and her new home.
On Wednesday, three-year-old Pippie, who underwent groundbreaking surgery a few weeks ago to give her new skin, left the paediatric ICU of Netcare Garden City Hospital for the Netcare Rehabilitation Hospital in Auckland Park.
By the afternoon, Pippie had settled into her new home after the excitement of leaving Garden City Hospital amid the clapping of other patients and corridors lined with hospital staff.
Pippie’s mother Anice Kruger had been emotional about the move, and began to cry as she said goodbye to her “family”: the staff who had cared for her child.
Mia seemed drained and said quietly: “It’s a real emotional experience (seeing Pippie go). I’m very happy that she’s going; there were lots of times when we never thought we would see this day.”
But the challenges Pippie faced at rehab, although not life-threatening, were going to be just as difficult. She would need to stretch her joints and gain muscle strength and learn to hold her head up again. She also would need to learn to speak again, and her exercises would be intense.
“What she does over the next few months will make everything we have done worthwhile,” said Mia, who will check on his patient a few times a week.
She will have a new physiotherapist and speech therapist.
The Star and other media were barred from following Pippie to rehab to find out more about what her stay would entail, as a magazine had solicited exclusive coverage of the child’s first days in rehab.
Pippie made global headlines when she underwent major surgery in which artificial skin grown from her own healthy cells at a lab in Boston, US, was grafted to her open burn wounds.
She was hurt on December 31 when the family were preparing to celebrate New Year with a braai on their Limpopo farm. A bottle of gel firelighter exploded in her dad Erwin Kruger’s hand.
Pippie, then only two years old, was next to him, and suffered third-degree burns.
She was rushed to Netcare Garden City Clinic, and when doctors saw her a few hours later, her body had swelled three times its normal size. Her face was covered in black soot and her skin looked like a leather shell.
Pippie has endured 45 operations, gone into cardiac arrest five times, and suffered pneumonia and kidney failure. After many reconstructive operations, her mom conducted her own research and found that skin could be grown for her daughter in the US.
Two 2x6cm pieces of her healthy skin were harvested and sent to Genzyme Laboratories, where the cells were laid on essentially dead mouse cells that acted as scaffolding for the new skin to grow on.
Pippie’s cells multiplied and grew into sheets of skin.
She was kept in an induced coma, and splinted and bandaged to keep her still to allow the initial healing to take place.