Refugee baby receives lifesaving heart surgery
AMMAN, Jordan — Sara al-Matoura watched through a window as her 1-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 lifesaving 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 U.N. 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 U.N. refugee agency, though the government estimates the number of Syrians in the country is twice as high.
After Eman’s surgery, her parents watched her breathe, her chest covered with bandages and wires, rising and failing in rhythm with the beeping monitor.
Doctors told them she would likely need another, more complicated surgery in two to five years.