We hear every day about the sectarian violence resulting in the deaths of innocent Iraqis and the tragic deaths of American troops serving in Baghdad who are trying to give Iraqis the security “space” needed to reconcile the terrible divisions in their society. Despite all the depressing news I want to report that hope and love are still alive in Iraq, and the Church of the Epiphany, San Carlos, is a part of that.

Last year, while serving as an emergency room physician in Baghdad at the US Air Force EMEDS surgical hospital, many of the U.S. military doctors and medics working in and around Baghdad volunteered at a free clinic sponsored by U.S. Army Civil Affairs located just “outside the wire” of our base where we treated poor patients from Baghdad and surrounding villages.

 While the Iraqi Ministry of Health has made great strides in repairing the health care and public health infrastructure that was starved and allowed to deteriorate under Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, sadly, much highly specialized medical and surgical care is no longer available in Iraq. This is largely due to the exodus of many specialist physicians and surgeons who have fled because of the threat of common criminal activity and kidnapping as well as sectarian violence. As a result of this, during the three days each week that we held clinic, we were often asked to see dozens of Iraqi civilians, many of whom had complicated medical problems. Since we worked alongside an Iraqi physician who intimately knew the capabilities of the various Iraqi specialty hospitals, in many cases we were able to make an accurate diagnosis and still refer the patient “downtown” to an Iraqi hospital. That was fun since we generally spoke by cell phone to an Iraqi doctor (all of whom are well trained and speak excellent English), and they obviously appreciated the professional courtesy we showed them and that we were augmenting, not supplanting, the fragile Iraqi healthcare system. However, in some very complicated cases, the care some patients required was beyond the capabilities currently present in Iraq, and it was appropriate to work with the National Iraqi Assistance Center (NIAC) to try to obtain care for a patient in Europe, elsewhere in the Middle East, or in the US.

In April of last year, a father brought his 10-year-old son, Ali, to see me. The child had a severe growth abnormality of his chest wall and had developed a severe spinal curvature (scoliosis) as a result. Despite being able to arrange surgical care for him for him in Philadelphia, his family very sadly decided at the last minute to not make the trip to the US. After I returned home to San Carlos in May, I kept in close touch by email with many of the Iraqi friends I made, the Iraqi doctor with whom I worked in Baghdad, and the wonderful Iraqi doctors at the NIAC. Just before Christmas I was contacted by NIAC and U.S. Army Civil Affairs and was asked to arrange surgical care for a 12-year-old girl from Baghdad with severe scoliosis. Through the generosity of Shriner’s Hospital in Philadelphia, little Shahad Abdulzahra has an appointment on June 12 for initial consultation and surgery. Shahad and her mother will be arriving in Philadelphia in early June and will be staying with a lovely Iraqi-American family in the Philadelphia suburbs. The housing was arranged by another great organization, Hosts for Hospitals. Our bishop, the Rt. Rev. Marc Andrus, has generously promised to donate some of the money our Outreach Commission lost when the tickets for the other Iraqi child were forfeited last fall, allowing the Church of the Epiphany to pay for the airline tickets for Shahad and her mother to travel from Kuwait to the US and to return once her recovery is complete. I would like to thank the members of the Church of the Epiphany and Bishop Andrus who, by helping Shahad get the medical care she needs in order to lead a normal life, are helping heal the world, one child at a time.
 

This article was originally published by Church of the Epiphany in the May 2007 edition of The Beacon.