An 11-year-old boy from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, is recovering \u00a0after surgeons in New Mexico successfully removed a football-sized tumor from his neck and upper body.<\/p>\n
The removal of the 11-pound growth was the culmination of a two-year charitable effort to get medical care for Jose Antonio Ramirez Serrano.<\/p>\n
The boy’s growth was the size of a golf ball at birth, but had grown to be nearly 12 inches long and 4 inches wide, Reuters reports.<\/p>\n
A 25-person medical team spent 12 hours operating on Serrano at the University of New Mexico Hospital.<\/p>\n
It marked a two-year effort by the First Baptist Church of Rio Rancho to help the boy. Church members became aware of him during a 2012 missionary effort. The boy’s parents had hit a dead end in terms of getting medical help for Jose in Mexico, Newser reports.<\/p>\n
The surgery was an important step for Serrano, according to church spokeswoman Kristean Alcocer.<\/p>\n
“The road to recovery will be long, and many challenges still lie ahead,” Alcocer said, according to the Associated Press.<\/p>\n
The mass is gone, but doctors said Serrano will still require a number of followup surgeries to reconstruct his shoulder and remove excess skin, UPI reports.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Source: Huffingtonpost.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An 11-year-old boy from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, is recovering \u00a0after surgeons in New Mexico successfully removed a football-sized tumor from his neck and upper body. The removal of the 11-pound growth was the culmination of a two-year charitable effort to get medical care for Jose Antonio Ramirez Serrano. The boy’s growth was the size of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":67442,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[7],"class_list":["post-67438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-togbe-afede-xiv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/67442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}