Phylecea Smith lives in one of the poorest parts of a very poor country, where $30 is a week’s salary and the primary mode of transportation is a pair of feet.

But Phylecea can’t walk far. She can’t keep up with her friends. She can’t run without gasping for air.

Or she couldn’t, at least, until a few weeks ago — when the efforts of two Heartland Regional Medical Center doctors and a number of other people changed her life forever.

Dr. Thomas Alderson and Dr. Francisco Lammoglia met Phylecea during a medical mission trip they made to Jamaica in November 2006. In a makeshift clinic set up in a church’s concrete auditorium, an echocardiogram machine revealed an artery in the 15-year-old’s heart that should have closed at birth remained open. As a result, her heart constantly pumped a portion of her blood out to her body without first sending it to her lungs for oxygen.

“She was running on half the oxygen of a healthy person,” Dr. Lammoglia, a cardiologist, says. “She exerted herself, and her muscles extracted every last bit of oxygen from her blood, but she didn’t have enough.”

In most developed countries, he added, a doctor listens to a baby’s heart soon after birth for a murmur that might indicate this artery has failed to close. If it has, the baby is given medication to make it close. But in third-world countries like Jamaica, where technology and resources are extremely limited, there’s little — if anything — that can be done for problems like Phylecea’s.

Fortunately for Phylecea, though, Dr. Lammoglia’s purpose for participating in his first-ever Jamaican medical mission — which Dr. Alderson has organized annually for the past three years — was to find someone like her.

“She came on the last day,” Dr. Alderson, a primary care physician, says. “It started then.”

The “it” to which he refers is the year and a half of paperwork and other arrangements he tackled to make it possible for Phylecea to receive surgery at Heartland.

He arranged for the St. Louis branch of Healing the Children, a non-profit organization that brings children in medical need to the United States, to pay for her plane tickets. He secured donations of the materials necessary for the surgery, and he received permission from Heartland for it to be performed free of charge.

Extra difficulties arose in the midst of these and other efforts, including Phylecea being rejected the first time she applied for a visa and, later, American Airlines canceling many of its flights the week she was scheduled to leave Jamaica. But Phylecea did make it here, arriving April 3 and staying with Dr. Alderson and his wife during her time in St. Joseph.

Now 17, Phylecea underwent surgery April 7. Dr. Lammoglia, under the direction of Dr. David Miller, a pediatric cardiologist from Denver, performed a procedure that allowed him to close off her problem artery with a spongy plug by going through a vein in one of her legs. It was the first time the surgery had been performed at Heartland.

With this plug in place, Phylecea’s blood could no longer bypass her lungs, meaning that for the first time in her life, it was becoming maximally oxygenated.

For the first time in her life, she could walk for more than just a few minutes without getting tired. And all the activities she was eager to do while she was here — shopping for straight-leg jeans at Old Navy, going to Heartland’s cafe for mango smoothies and ice-cream drumsticks, taking in all the stores and traffic that were completely foreign to her — she was able to enjoy without the chronic fatigue she’d always known.

By the time she arrived home on April 18, Phylecea had experienced not only all this, but also her first airplane flights and her first encounter with snow. This undoubtedly left her with plenty of stories to share with her family, but what caught their attention the most was the fact that the girl who came back to them wasn’t the same as the one who’d left a few weeks earlier.

“She was running around and doing great,” Dr. Lammoglia says. “At home, her mom and grandma were astounded she could do what she hadn’t been able to all her life.”

Without the surgery, he added, Phylecea’s life would have continued to be significantly limited, if not shortened.

“She might have been dead within a few years,” says Dr. Lammoglia’s nurse, Lila Francis, who went on the medical mission in 2006 and helped take care of Phylecea while she was here. “I’m just glad we could help her.”

Lifestyles reporter Erin Wisdom can be reached at ewisdom@npgco.com.