Double lung transplant survivor headlines Make-A-Wish event
Some 200 people packed into the Bright Eye Beer Co., on Park Avenue in Long Beach, last Sunday morning to raise money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. While participants wanted to raise funds for the foundation that helps fulfill the wishes of children with critical illnesses, a major draw was a tiny 19-year-old who last year underwent a double lung transplant: Masha Benitez.
Benitez, who underwent a 13½-hour procedure at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan last May, has had her ups and downs since coming home in June. Recently, she said, she had stomach problems, and was back at Columbia Presbyterian. She was released last Friday, two days before the fundraiser.
On Sunday, Benitez stood in front of a box of raffle tickets and spoke with well-wishers and members of the news media. She said she felt “OK” but “not great.” Her recovery, her father, Luis “Tony” Benitez, said, has been slow.
Masha, who is under 5 feet tall, still speaks softly, a lingering effect of her surgery, and is frail, weighing only about 80 pounds.
But she was energetic on Sunday. She walked through the crowd and answered questions about her health and the need to fund Make-A-Wish. Those who want to donate need to go to tinyurl.com/PolarBearSplash.
On Sunday night, Masha was back in the hospital, her mother, Michelle Quigley said Wednesday. She said Masha may need her appendix and bladder removed.
Benitez has been collecting for Make-A-Wish since she was 5, two years after she was adopted from Russia, where she was born to a woman who had to give her up, by a Long Beach couple. Over the years, she has said, she has collected about $130,000 for the foundation.
“Today is the combination of hard work and concern on the part of the people of Long Beach,“ Tony Benitez said. “It’s about my daughter and her desire to help children. Masha certainly has an understanding of children in pain.”
Her parents, Benitez and Michelle Quigley, have been at her bedside constantly when she has been hospitalized. Before they adopted her, she was in an orphanage in Russia, where she said she had been mistreated. The Rotary Club of Brooklyn, which helps needy children who require corrective heart surgery, paid for her to come to the United States, where she was first hospitalized at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park.
Benitez and Quigley met Masha at a Ronald McDonald House that is connected to the medical center. They immediately wanted to adopt her, but the Russian government made the process difficult. It took two years for the adoption to be completed. Masha was a sickly child, and was eventually diagnosed with veno-occlusive disease, a rare pulmonary hypertension.
She will turn 20 in March.
Sue Spiritis, who has known the Benitiz family for years and was among the crowd at the Bright Eye on Sunday, said she had helped decorate Masha’s room at their home in Long Beach. “I’m an organizer,” Spiritis said.
Jim Mulvaney, a former investigative reporter at Newsday who’s now an adjunct professor in the Law and Police Science Department at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, came to the fundraiser with his wife, the author Barbara Fischkin, and their son, Dan Mulvaney, an expert surfer who later took part in the Polar Bear Plunge, which also raises money for Make-A-Wish.
“We love Masha and we love Make-A-Wish,” Mulvaney said. Some 30 years ago, he said, his cousin was hospitalized and bed-ridden, but wanted to go to the Super Bowl. His cousin’s father contacted Make-A-Wish, and they both went to the game, flown to Miami by the foundation.
“They put (my cousin) on the field,” Mulvaney said.
At the Bright Eye, Jimmy Joseph, Benitez’s uncle, was calling out the numbers of winning tickets for gift baskets. “I want to take a quick moment to give thanks to the family who gave Masha the gift of life,” he said. The lung donor remains unknown to the Benitez family. Michelle Quigley has said she never prayed for the lungs, “because that would mean someone else had lost a child.”
