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LISA GREENEEvents after a bombing raid bring an Iraqi boy to Tampa for surgery he couldn't get at home.
TAMPA - At home in his Iraqi village, Jabur Raid Jabar has faced danger from bombs and bullets.
But the 8-year-old faces another danger: a congenital heart defect that could one day kill him.
Monday, surgeons will try to end that threat by fixing his heart problem, a narrowed aorta, through the Gift of Life program at St. Joseph's Children's Hospital.
Wearing a T-shirt with an American flag pin fastened to it, Jabur came to a news conference at the hospital Friday with his grandmother, Noreya Dalaf, and his host family to talk about his surgery. Jabur will be one of more than 60 children from other countries who have gotten surgery at St. Joseph's they could not receive at home.
He climbed on a chair so he would be tall enough to be heard by the TV microphones and addressed the cameras in loud, clear Arabic. It was a message he hoped would be transmitted back to his family in Iraq, in the town of Ad Dujayl, north of Baghdad.
He "sends his best regards," said Bahaa El-Hadidy, a retired University of South Florida professor who translated for Jabur. He feels well, Jabur said. He is being well cared for. And he will be good.
El-Hadidy said Jabur's family already knew he had a heart problem. But the chain of events that brought him to Tampa began during a bombing raid. Jabur was "running scared" as he heard explosions, and a pot of boiling water somehow fell on his legs, burning him.
His father went to coalition forces asking for help, and Jabur was taken to a hospital. A military surgeon there learned about his heart problem after realizing the blood flow in his burned legs was too low.
The hospital put Jabur in touch with Gift of Life, a Rotary International Service Program that brings to the United States children who can't receive open-heart surgery in foreign countries. St. Joseph's surgeons are doing the surgery for free and Ybor City Rotarians are donating $5,000 to the hospital to help cover the costs.
Jabur's condition is called coarctation of the aorta, a dangerous narrowing of the blood vessel that takes oxygenated blood from the heart to start its journey through the body. For most children, it causes high blood pressure.
But over time, blood pressure can become dangerously high in the upper body and too low in the lower body. The heart can fail. As the narrowing causes the aorta to weaken, an aneurysm can form, or the aorta can split.
On Monday, Jabur will go into surgery, and surgeons will stop the blood flow in his aorta. Then they will remove the narrow part, probably just one to two centimeters long, and reconnect the ends, said Dr. Paul Chai, one of the surgeons on the team.
Jabur should be hospitalized for a week or two and remain in Tampa for about a month to recover, Chai said. The surgery has a success rate of more than 90 percent, he said. The most serious risk happens in less than 1 percent of cases. Because clamping off the aorta also stops blood flow to his spine, there is a small risk he could be paralyzed.
But Jabur isn't afraid of the surgery, El-Hadidy said. His biggest wish has been to speak to his father, still in the Middle East, before Monday. So far, they haven't been able to reach Jabur's family by phone.
On Friday, Jabur sat quietly, his feet dangling, as adults talked about his condition. After a while, he started to fidget.
But when it was his turn to talk, he stood in front of the microphones without looking nervous. Asked what he would like to do when he returned to Iraq, he gave El-Hadidy a short answer: He would like to be president.
When he was finished, he added four words, in English:
"Thank you very much."