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Iraqi girl’s kin praise God after good news from surgeons
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
After surgeons delivered good news from the operating room Monday morning about 3-month-old Noor al-Zahra, a wave of relief washed over the baby’s grandmother Soad.
Tense muscles relaxed. An electric smile lit up her face. She wept. “The results are good,” Soad said through an interpreter. “Thank God. Thank God.”
She also thanked Dr. Roger Hudgins, chief neurosurgeon at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, where the operation was performed.
“Noor is very, very strong,” the grandmother said. “From her first days, she’s been very strong.”
“She is very strong because her family is strong,” Hudgins said. Hudgins and Dr. Fernando Burstein operated on Baby Noor, as she has come to be known, nine days after the infant arrived in Atlanta from Iraq suffering from a severe case of spina bifida.
They removed a mass of skin from the baby’s back and repaired a damaged part of her spinal cord. Their efforts came a month after Georgia National Guard soldiers in Iraq encountered Noor while raiding a house near Baghdad.
Doctors in Iraq told Noor’s family they could not treat her and that she probably would die within 45 days. With help from friends in metro Atlanta, though, the soldiers made connections that led to Monday’s surgery on Noor.
Hudgins said the operation went better than expected. He said the baby will be paralyzed from the waist down and have limited control of her bowels and bladder, but he hopes she otherwise will be developmentally and mentally normal.
He said he plans to monitor her today for signs of a fluid buildup in her brain, common in similar spina bifida cases. If he finds fluid, he may insert a shunt Wednesday to drain the fluid.
Or, he said, he may try to create an internal opening to drain fluid. One benefit of the internal option is that it would not require as much care from a neurosurgeon in Iraq.
“She just radiates good feeling,” Hudgins said of Noor. “We’re getting to the point where we love this child.”
Noor’s father and grandmother, who accompanied her to Atlanta, spoke with relatives in Iraq after the surgery, said Christina Porter of Childspring International, a Christian charity that brings ill children to the United States for medical help.
“We’ve been through a lot of calling cards,” she said. Porter said the father and grandmother are communicating with an Atlanta host family with “charades and sign language.” The father and grandmother speak Arabic; members of the host family speak English, Farsi and Turkish, she said.
Hudgins saluted the baby’s grandmother for having “the courage to hold [Noor] up to men with guns.” He praised members of a Gainesville-based unit of the 48th Brigade Combat Team for taking an interest in Noor.
“They deserve a tremendous amount of credit,” he said.
In Baghdad, soldiers from the unit that helped send Noor to Atlanta watched a news conference about the baby’s surgery on a small computer screen in Sgt. 1st Class Michael Sonen’strailer.
“I think we are all relieved that she now has the opportunity for a decent life,” said Sonen, a soldier with the Gainesville-based Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment.
“This is what America does best — help people,” said Sonen, a furniture maker from Dahlonega.
Staff Sgt. David Squires, who works for a hearing aid company in Gainesville, said he hopes the soldiers’ intervention gave Noor a “better chance at life.” “If nothing else, it showed the family that we took time out to help,” he said. “This small gesture might go a long way in establishing goodwill among the people.”
Doctors expect Noor to stay in Atanta for at least two months for observation and additional treatment.
“It’s hard to tell sometimes if we made a difference here in Iraq,” Squires said. “This baby made us feel like we did.”
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