Hole in Palestine’s heart is plugged in Washington Girl receives life-saving operation George S. Hishmeh Special to The Daily Star WASHINGTON: Typical of a 2-year-old, Falastin, Arabic for Palestine, loved frolicking on the floor in the living room of her temporary but spacious residence in northeast Washington, unaware that last month she had a hole in her heart. “Falastin is one of the most beautiful little girls I have come across,” said Barbara Zakheim, director of development at the US branch of the Israel-based Save A Child’s Heart Foundation. “She is just delightful.” Rania Awwad, a postgraduate student in genetics at George Washington University who herself was born in Nablus a few miles from Falastin’s hometown of Khirbat Musbah near Ramallah, is also excited by the good news about the success of this life-saving heart operation. Falastin’s growth had been stunted by her congenital condition. “The difference in the little girl’s energy levels compared to when she first arrived in Washington … is remarkable,” she said. Before, Falastin rarely left her mother’s lap and cried constantly. She now laughs and runs around “like a completely different Falastin ? which is what all her doctors said would happen once the pressure on her heart and lungs was relieved.” Before the operation, the family of 10 left for Washington via Amman. “We slept at the checkpoint for eight nights under the skies waiting our turn to cross into Jordan,” said Falstin’s mother, Karima Ali, 36. “The heat was oppressive and I spent nearly all my savings of gold coins during that week.” Awwad elaborated: “Each day the Israeli authorities would allow the (King Hussein Bridge that links Jordan to the Israeli-occupied Palestinian areas) to open for one or two hours at a time … For eight straight days the entire family waited in line, carrying a baby with a serious heart condition, sleeping outside on the ground, eating only what could be bought from street vendors.” “Back home,” said Karima, “there is war, there is no security. There is no freedom. I sometimes try to take my child to hospital and it’s just random if I ever make it there.” Her Palestinian husband, Mutlaq, who was born in Kuwait, and his seven other children remained behind in Amman with relatives pending the outcome of the surgery. He has been jobless for about a year. A heavy machine operator, he was employed by an Israeli construction company that builds Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Awwad is the local representative of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), which helped fund the effort, along with the Rotary Club program called Gift of Life, and the Larry King Cardiac Foundation, named after the television personality. PCRF provided the cost of the trip to the US and stay, while the others shared in the cost of the $40,000 operation. The American physicians contributed their time. The operation took place at Children’s National Medical Center, a nonprofit organization, and Falastin convalesced at the nearby Ronald McDonald House until her return home at the end of last month. To avoid intrusive open-heart surgery, a team of eight, led by Dr. Michael Slack, a cardiologist at the Children’s National Medical Center, used a new, less-invasive device to close the hole in Falastin’s heart. “Now patients can have a defect completely and permanently treated with essentially no incision and with the potential to go home as early as the same day,” explained Slack. Steve Sosebee, whose wife Huda al-Masri is a Palestinian-born social worker, runs the Cleveland-based PCRF. He said that since there is no local pediatric cardiac surgery team in Palestine, Falastin was “very lucky, given the fact there are hundreds of other children like her who are not going to get the same chance of treatment she had.” PCRF, a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization was established in 1991, according to its website, “to address the medical and humanitarian crisis facing Palestine youth.” Now, it has expanded to include children from other Arab countries. It does this by locating cost-free medical care for those children “who are unable to get the necessary and specialized treatment in their homeland.” At present, there are about eight Palestinian children receiving care in the US, thanks to PCRF. It was the PCRF that approached the Save A Child’s Heart Foundation to help Falastin, as it has done in the past for similar cases. But most of the cases were treated in Tel Aviv. Zakheim said her group had treated more than 200 Palestinian children in the past seven years. Save A Child’s Heart was established in 1995 by an American-born Israeli pediatric heart surgeon, Dr. Amram “Ami” Cohen, when he was at the Wolfson Medical Center in Tel Aviv. Zakheim said Cohen was allowed to treat several Korean children with congenital heart conditions during service in Korea. The foundation was started following an appeal from an Ethiopian doctor to Cohen in the treatment of children with congenital heart defects ? a situation that precipitated the establishment of similar autonomous centers in different parts of the world. “This organization has so far cared for over 700 children with 800 procedures from 15 different countries, including Palestine,” Zakheim said, stressing the international feature of the organization. “The demand has been greater than we could accommodate so we have expanded by performing surgeries in other countries,” she added, as the case was for the first time with Falastin in Washington. Karima Ali was very appreciative of all the care and attention her daughter has received in the US. She singled out Dr. George Wadie of the Mutalaa Hospital in Jerusalem, for special thanks after he put her in touch with PCRF. “It took seven months before the hole in Falastin’s heart was discovered” by Wadie when she walked into the hospital out of desperation over her daughter, she recalled.
