U.S. and India unite to win hearts of Iraqi children

By Renuka Naj 6 March 2004 - Mustafa Ahmed Hanish is blue from head to toe. His mother, Fatin Ali, sits nearby stroking his head and praying for his life. In a few minutes, the three-year-old will be wheeled to the operating theatre where India's leading cardiac surgeon Dr. K.M. Cherian will cut open his chest and perform surgery to fix a defect in his heart. Tomorrow, he will operate on another child and another the day after that. Nothing is unusual about this scene, except that Mustafa and 19 other Iraqi children would have needlessly died for lack of surgery in their strife-torn country. What started as a simple e-mail request from an American who worked nine months with U.S. forces in Iraq turned into a mission of multiple faiths. Jonathan Miles of Brothers Together wrote to Dr Cherian asking help for Iraqi children suffering from congenital heart defects. The 63-year-old Indian doctor who performed the first infant heart transplant in the country and operated on a Pakistani boy when India-Pakistan were locked in Kargil war quickly accepted the request. Within days, a plan was chalked out to fly 20 Iraqi children to Chennai for open-heart surgery. But the journey to India from Iraq was not easy. Two lives were needlessly lost while waiting for paperwork. As passports issued during Saddam Hussein's regime were no longer valid, new travel permits were needed for the children and accompanying guardian. For Baghdad accountant Jamal Ibrahim, 34, a ride to the Jordanian border to bid farewell to his son proved critical when he found out that his wife had been denied permission to leave the country. Sensing the urgency of his son's condition, he switched place with her and travelled with the group from Amman to Bahrain and Muscat before touching down in Chennai. Scared and unsure of their fate, the Iraqi children arrived with their escorts on 26 February. Dr Cherian, chairman and chief executive of the International Centre for Cardio Thoracic and Vascular Diseases, a unit of Frontier Lifeline Pvt. Ltd, took over their care from there. "Most of the children came with heart conditions requiring surgery that would have cost an estimated $45,000-$50,000 per child in the United States or $4,000-$5,000 in India," he said. For the families from Iraq, where chaotic sprees of looting and anarchy have disrupted local medical supplies and services, the amount was unimaginable and the prospects of travelling abroad for surgical help remote. "They were in bad condition, suffering from severe and complex defects," said Dr Cherian who waived the entire cost of surgery and hospitalisation for the children. Without his hospital's timely intervention, many would have died of what he called tetralogy of fallot, a complex heart condition that starves blood flow to the lungs causing body to turn blue. According to him, some of the reasons for such defects are malnutrition, viral infections during early pregnancy and marriages among blood relatives. Out of the 20 children, 17 came from Baghdad and the rest from Fallujah, Babylon and Diyala; most arrived either with their mother, aunt or grandmother. The women, who were covered head to toe in their abaya (dark billowing clothing) and hijab (headscarves), stayed close to the children. Sometimes they would place the children in a chair and wheel them down the corridor. And at other times, they would venture out the hospital to buy toys, balloons or fruits. When they did none of that, they would pull out their little rugs, kneel down and pray. Said Linda McFadden, a nurse and volunteer for Brothers Together, who escorted the team from Bahrain: "All the women are housewives. None had flown in an airplane. They are bored; they are tired, and they want to get it over with; but they know it takes time." Since 1 March, two children have been operated every day. Today, it is Mustafa's turn. He was born with a heart defect in which only one of the main pumping chambers is used fully. The correction requires bi-directional Glenn procedure or a surgery that reroutes the direction of the blood in the top half of his heart. After the operation, Mustafa will be allowed to wake up in the intensive care unit where he will stay for the next 48 hours. Follow-up care will include, among other lung exercises, blowing balloons with physiotherapists. After a week of operations that saw 10 children go under Dr Cherian's surgical knives, McFadden pointed out, "Everything has gotten better for them once they saw the children doing well. Now they are less anxious." Amena Jasim, a 44-year-old Iraqi grandmother, surprised everyone when she walked up to Dr. Cherian, took his hand and kissed it after her grandson's surgery. Hadi Moften, 38, waited until his son had his operation to distribute pastries that his wife had prepared in Iraq. Saad Daood, 37, a driver in Baghdad, said in halting English that his son has "started to eat again, his cheeks look full, and his nails no longer blue". He added that he would throw a big party when he gets back to Iraq not only because his son is on road to recovery but also his country is free off Saddam. When asked whether the Iraqi children would have received better care in a western country, McFadden, who worked at the Lutheran Hospital in Denver, Colo., said, "It would have been just as good. All the monitoring equipment and nursing care is excellent - Dr Cherian is up-to-date on everything." The 126-bed hospital, which opened two weeks before the Iraqi children arrived in Chennai, boasts among other things, Asia's first porcelain operating theatre to ensure a dust-free and zero-bacteria atmosphere. Pending successful completion of the other operations, all children will return to Iraq before March end. Their round-trip fare has been covered by CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Network based in Virginia Beach, U.S. Ahead of their journey home, the hospital invited India's revered Hindu saint Kanchi Sankaracharya to bless the Iraqi children who received a new lease of life. Sitting in his modest office with a model heart on his desk, Dr Cherian marvelled at the life-saving mission that brought multiple faiths together. From an Israeli non-profit that sought medical help from a secular India to children of a Muslim nation flying to Chennai with the support of a Christian group. He noted that isolated acts of kindness from the battlefield had evolved into an inspiring chain of events, pushing beyond the boundaries of race, colour religion and ethnicity. The only common currency being the quest to save lives. Meanwhile, in the paediatric ward, Mustafa Ahmed Hanish flitted about like a butterfly; his skin now the colour of cherry blossom. Renuka Naj is a freelance journalist.

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