Thanks to Dr. Cuadros — and Smile Train — having a cleft on the Navajo reservations of New Mexico is no longer a sentence to a life of isolation and sickness.
Nurse Celeste always tried to avoid working with the babies with clefts in her neonatal ward because she felt unable to meet their needs. Then her son was born with a cleft.
"Knowing the strong emotions I felt when Ethan was born, it was hard to imagine how a family with no access to life-saving surgery would feel. I wanted to help."