Resilience: my story of overcoming obstacles of bladder exstrophy to impact lives around the world

Résumé

My name is Anna Artigas, and I am a 17-year-old living in Vero Beach, Florida. I was born in China with bladder exstrophy and was abandoned in a crowded train station by my Chinese family when I was about two years old. Someone found me crouched in a corner and took me to the local orphanage. For the next 28 months, I would spend most of the day tied to a chair, constantly wet from urine that seeped from my belly. My bladder looked like a little red ball sitting outside my tummy. While at the orphanage, I was taken to the hospital twice for surgery to put my bladder back into my abdomen. Both times, the surgery failed, and my bladder was back outside.