Syrian refugee baby gets life-saving surgery, others wait

She is my gift from God: mother

AMMAN, Jordan, March 14, (AP): Sara al-Matoura watched through a window as her one-year-old daughter’s chest heaved up and down under a tangle of medical wires.

The 22-year-old mother from the Syrian city of Homs hadn’t eaten for a day and stayed up all night at a hospital in the Jordanian capital, Amman, holding her daughter, imagining the scalpel cutting her baby’s chest open.

Al-Matoura, who fled the Syrian war for Jordan in 2012, was only four months pregnant with her second child when she found out the baby had a congenital heart defect known as tricuspid atresia, which has a mortality rate of 90 percent before age 10.

Jordanian doctors encouraged her to abort the fetus. Al-Matoura refused. “She is my gift from God,” she said. She named her daughter Eman – “faith” in Arabic.

Last week, Eman received life-saving open heart surgery, one of eight cardiac operations that Italian pediatric surgeons from the Vatican’s Bambino Gesu Hospital came to perform for free in Jordan.

Dozens of other Syrian refugees with cancer, heart defects and other complex conditions go untreated each month because of funding constraints, according to UN officials. The more expensive the treatment, the more likely their funding requests will be turned down. Even primary care and basic services such as child delivery are increasingly unaffordable.

Some 5.5 million Syrians have fled their homeland since 2011, most settling in the region. Jordan currently hosts more than 650,000 Syrians registered by the UN refugee agency, though the government estimates the number of Syrians in the country is twice as high.

Seven years into the Syria conflict, with European and American doors increasingly shut to refugees and no signs of peace in Syria, neighboring countries like Jordan are cutting resources for Syrians, saying they cannot even afford to take care of their own people.

While Eman was in the operating room, another Syrian mother in Amman tried to keep her 12-year-old son Tamer from moving too much, afraid that his lips and hands would turn blue.

She fled the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta on the first day of the chemical attacks in 2013.

“They started at 3 a.m. and I left at 8 in the morning,” she said of the attacks, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions for her family members in Syria. She brought her three boys, including a two-week-old baby, to Jordan.

Tamer, her second son, also has a congenital heart defect. When he moves too much, he loses his breath and turns blue.

Children with his condition should receive an operation at age five or six, according to Dr Iyad al-Ammouri, pediatric cardiologist at the University of Jordan Hospital.

But Tamer’s final surgery costs up to $28,000, far more than his mother can afford. She supports her sons alone, with her husband still trapped in Syria.

Jordan used to subsidize Syrians’ fees at government health facilities, so they paid the same as uninsured Jordanians. But the subsidies were cancelled in February, meaning refugees must pay two to five times more for lifesaving interventions.