Wednesday, April 20 (day #6)

We said good bye to Mike and Anne last night as they both had obligations to return to back in Indy. So we started Wednesday after some much needed sleep, still early but with a slightly smaller team.
Our 1st case is Ahmad Abood Issa Masoud, an eight year old from Syria. He has Pulmonary Atresia, VSD. His oxygen saturation on room air is around 40% so he is very blue. Even under anesthesia, on 100% oxygen, his O2 saturation lingers around 80% so he needs increased flow to his lungs. Dr. Turrentine and Dr. Khoury plan to put a patch from his right ventricle to his pulmonary artery which will be an RVOT reconstruction to augment that flow and increase his oxygen. He was super scared as he entered the OR — just kept saying (in Arabic) that he wanted his father, wanted his father…….
The case went really well. The surgeons and the cardiologist were all quite pleased with the result. The consensus is that he’ll have a lot more energy and feel a lot better following this procedure.
During the change over of our room, we were visited by our patient from a year ago, Rulan and her mother from Jericho. She had an echo with Dr. Kal which looked fine. we thought she looked great! Her color was good, she has lots of energy and spunk. (prior to surgery, she was very very blue with really low oxygen saturations and according to here mother, could do very little-she was basically carried everywhere). She’s still pretty shy, but extremely fashionable…..so good to see them!
The 2nd case is Dua’a Khairi Kamal Hindi. She is an 11 month old Egyptian girl who lives here in Amman. She has Tetrology of Fallot and is pretty cyanotic. The surgeons closed her VSD, put a patch across her pulmonary outflow and at 4:30 she was up to the ICU. As soon as her father looked at her, he said “she is so much better-her color is pink now!”

Murtada, Husein and Maryam were discharged today-all doing very well and happy.

Hussein is stealing my heart...what a smile:)

To those of you that don’t know…Marah was the very 1st GOLA patient that was done in Amman about 5 years ago. She had her first surgery, a PDA ligation as an infant. Rudy Habesch, our are dear friend from GOLA who has been instrumental to the success of these missions, provided me with a picture of Marah during her first sugery. Also pictures of her in Dr. Kal’s office eating cheetoes after surgery. I am adding the recent pictures of her this week so you can all see how’s she’s grown. We are thrilled to have been able to complete her surgery in all one stage