Mila's Miracle : Good Samaritans: A Navy wife, touched by a Tijuana street vendor acting out a fairy tale for her disabled daughter, brought strangers together to get medical help for the woman, whose body was riddled with cancer.

By H.G. REZA

Aug. 2, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Mila Newman, a hard-charging Navy wife whose curiosity helped save a Tijuana woman’s life, called it “the miracle of Little Red Riding Hood.”

Olga Rodriguez, who survived a horrific case of breast cancer so advanced that a San Diego surgeon gave her little hope of survival, called her fateful meeting with Newman on a dusty Tijuana street last fall simply “a miracle from God.”

Dr. Robert Schorr, the compassionate San Diego surgeon who operated on Rodriguez in a Tijuana clinic, called her recovery “not a cure, but an amazing result.” He removed a one-pound tumor bigger than football that was growing inside and outside the 44-year-old widow’s left breast.

Rodriguez’s lymph glands were also cancerous. The glands, normally the size of a lima bean in a healthy person, measured 2 inches, said Schorr, who has practiced medicine for 41 years.

Rodriguez’s cancer “was incurable by definition,” he said.

Nevertheless, Rodriguez survived the operation last November, and, though not cured, is living as normal a life as possible for someone who is still threatened by the disease. She said she still cannot understand how a dedicated group of Americans--strangers to her and to each other--worked together to “move mountains” and save her life.

Rodriguez’s road to survival began last October, when Newman, who was shopping in Tijuana with relatives, heard Rodriguez reciting the story of Little Red Riding Hood to her 4-year-old disabled daughter, Elsa Clotilde, who suffers from a rare birth disease that caused the left side of her face to be deformed.

Newman, a native of Puerto Rico married to a Navy officer, walked across the street to watch as Rodriguez recited and acted out the popular children’s story for her daughter. She was nearly moved to tears by the child’s disability and Rodriguez’s devotion to her.

Touched by the sight of mother and daughter, she promised Rodriguez that she would try to obtain medical help for Elsa from doctors in the United States. Two days later, Newman returned to Tijuana to give Rodriguez the name of a group of U.S. doctors who donate medical care to poor children from foreign countries.

Newman, unaware of Rodriguez’s cancer at the time, was excited at the prospect of helping Elsa. Instead, when Newman arrived at the curio stand where Rodriguez scrapes out a living for her two children and 75-year-old father, she found the Tijuana woman distraught and talking about dying.

“I can’t explain anything that’s happened. How or why I got the disease, and how people I don’t even know have helped me,” Rodriguez said. “I first noticed a lump in my breast shortly after Elsa was born. Later, I noticed a pimple that just continued to grow.”

“But a doctor in Tijuana told me not to worry, that if it didn’t hurt me it wasn’t cancer. On the day that Mila returned to Tijuana, another doctor had just informed me that the tumor growing through my breast was cancerous. She (the doctor) said I needed surgery immediately, or I would die.”

Rodriguez’s medical crisis moved Newman to get involved. The determined Navy wife said she became “overbearing” in her quest to help Rodriguez. Her low-keyed husband, Lt. Cmdr. Doug Newman, offered encouragement.

At one point, Newman stormed through her husband’s office and cajoled officers into contributing money to help pay for Rodriguez’s medical expenses. It was a secretary in her husband’s office who put her in touch with Schorr.

Although it took less than two weeks from the time she met Newman until she underwent surgery, Rodriguez feared that every day she waited for the operation brought her closer to death.

She said that her main concern was not for herself, but for Elsa, who suffers from Goldenhar’s syndrome and does not have any bones in the left side of her face.

The girl suffers from an abundance of medical complications. When Elsa was born, doctors gave her only 12 days to live. The baby could not keep food down long enough to digest it, and, almost immediately after she was born, began to spit up blood.

“For the first three months of Elsa’s life, I slept sitting up with her. I would sit in a chair, hold the baby next to me, and the two of us would sleep sitting up. She couldn’t sleep like normal children because then she would throw up her meals,” Rodriguez said.

Elsa cannot walk or speak. She has a hole in her heart, Rodriguez said. However, her quick smile is a clear sign of her intelligence. And she understands Spanish and English, which she picked up while listening to her mother barter with tourists near the San Ysidro Port of Entry.

Schorr, 64, said his decision to operate on Rodriguez without asking for a fee was motivated in large part by Elsa’s profound health problems.

“Without (her mother), what’s going to happen to this little girl?” Schorr said.

Rodriguez said she still remembers Schorr’s reaction when they met in Schorr’s La Mesa office.

“When Dr. Schorr looked at my breast, I saw the expression on his face. I could tell that he didn’t want to touch the tumor. Almost as if he was repulsed by the sight of it. The expression on his face also told me that he thought I was going to die,” said Rodriguez.

In agreeing to be interviewed, Schorr insisted that he did not want to be portrayed “as a big philanthropist.”

“It did me more good than it did her. There was something about her that moved me. . . . I rarely would agree to do something for nothing. But I don’t know what it was about this case that persuaded me to operate on this woman, in a Tijuana clinic that I was totally unfamiliar with and in a country where I was not licensed to practice medicine,” Schorr said.

Since Rodriguez had no health insurance, it quickly became evident that the surgery could not be performed in the United States. Schorr consulted David Sanchez, a friend and operating room orderly at Alvarado Hospital. Sanchez, 28, is a graduate of a medical university in Mexico.

For several hours each day, before traveling to his hospital job in La Mesa, and on weekends, Sanchez works as a physician at the Bernardette Clinic in a poor Tijuana neighborhood.

Sanchez arranged for Schorr to perform surgery at the clinic, with Sanchez as his assistant. The scrub nurse was a Spanish-speaking medical student whose name Schorr does not know.

“I was serving as an anatomy instructor at the UCSD Medical Center. This fellow came up and said he was from South America and had never witnessed an operation. I told him I would be doing surgery in Tijuana on Saturday and asked him if he wanted to join us,” said Schorr.

“On the morning of the surgery, David and I picked him up at a restaurant and the three of us drove to Tijuana. Lucky for us, because he turned out to be the scrub nurse. He had never scrubbed in his life.”

The cost of the surgery totaled about $700, including use of the clinic’s operating room and the fee charged by the anesthesiologist, who was from Tijuana.

“All of the lymph glands were full of cancer. . . . The tumor, the glands, they were categorically inoperable. I was not curing this woman. I was merely debulking the tumor. . . . The best we could hope for was that we could control the local disease,” said Schorr.

The two-hour operation was not without a crisis. The large tumor removed by Schorr had grown around the axillary vein. Cutting the vein accidentally could have caused a fatal hemorrhage, but Schorr managed to scrape the tumor from around the vein.

The operation was successful beyond Schorr’s most optimistic expectations.

“I’m astounded and overwhelmed by her response to the operation. She recuperated without complications, and I can’t tell you how odd this is,” Schorr said. “God in some way must be trying to say to her, ‘I’ve given you a bad deal, but I’m trying to help you here.’ ”

“When I found out how sick I was, I began to worry about what would happen to Elsa if I died,” Rodriguez said. “But now I face the future with more confidence.”

Rodriguez’s recuperation was aided with the help of a La Mesa chemotherapist who gave her chemotherapy treatments free of charge for six months. The doctor did not want to be identified.

Rodriguez is also taking hormone pills as part of her therapy. A Mexican family that owns a chain of drug stores in Tijuana, and who also wanted to remain anonymous, is providing Rodriguez with free medication. At one point the family chartered a private jet to fly medication for Rodriguez from Mexico City to Tijuana.

Schorr, who was a minor league pitcher in the St. Louis Cardinals organization in 1947, remains modest about saving Rodriguez’s life.

“I haven’t cured her,” Schorr said. “I helped better her quality of life. Believe me, this experience has done me a lot of personal good. I don’t know what it is, but there was something about this woman that moved me deeply. I don’t want anybody to think that what I did was philanthropic.”

Yet, other doctors said he has a reputation for opening his office to all patients, regardless of their ability to pay. It was Schorr who persuaded the chemotherapist, who is a friend, to donate his services to help Rodriguez.

Rodriguez said she is thankful to Schorr and everyone who has helped her.

“Mila and I are like sisters now. But Dr. Schorr will always be somebody special. His generosity has made it possible for me to continue caring for my daughter. The longer I live, the better chance she has to one day find a doctor like Dr. Schorr; somebody who can operate on her face and repair her heart. I want to live long enough to see this happen.”

Newman says getting help for Elsa is her next challenge. “I just see a beautiful little girl. I know we can do something for this little girl. . . . This has shown me what God can do for people, and I’m sure he can do the same for Elsa.”