DENVILLE--DECEMBER 27--Fourteen-year-old Iraqi Asaid Abed and his father Saleh are all smiles Tuesday after a being released from the hospital following successful heart surgery. PHOTO BY TYSON TRISH/2005 DENVILLE--DECEMBER 27--Fourteen-year-old Iraqi Asaid Abed plays a video game with Yasmin Assaf after being released from the hospital Tuesday following successful heart surgery.

Family opens home, hearts to Iraqi boy's medical plight

From Baghdad to Morris Plains: After heart surgery, 14-year-old wants to sightsee

BY ROB SEMAN
DAILY RECORD

DENVILLE -- Unlike most 14-year-old boys, Asaid Abed said he doesn't have an idea of what he'd like to do when he grows up.

He's not even sure what he'd like to do in the next two weeks.

For most of his life, those ambitions were afterthoughts in the face of simply surviving, as a set of congenital heart defects robbed him of his health. The little chance of treatment of surgery in his Baghdad, Iraq home also robbed his family of hope.

Tuesday was a turnabout day, however.

Asaid and three other Iraqi children left Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx after undergoing open-heart-surgery. Now, doctors said, Abed should have a full life --and all the time he needs to decide what to do with it.

Asaid and his father have been staying with members of two Rotary Clubs in Morris County and chatted with a reporter on Tuesday afternoon.

"I don't know what I want to see," Asaid said through an interpreter. "But I want to see more" sights in the metropolitan area.

When they arrived in the United States, the Iraqi children and their parents were put up in homes of local Rotarians in the metropolitan area.

Asaid and his father were taken in by Morris Plains Rotarian Larry Ripley.

For Ripley, 56, a single father whose adult children had moved out before he bought his home in Morris Plains, Asaid was the second child he took in from the Gift of Life program, and he said he was all too happy to do it.

"Honestly, it's very enjoyable and a lot of fun," Ripley said. "I learn a lot of things about people from other countries and other cultures."

Ripley said he and his guests communicated by pointing at phrases in a book.

"We would laugh at each other's mispronunciations," Ripley said.

Kitchen gratitude

The family's gratitude was apparent right away, Ripley said.

"When they first got here, I had a sink full of dirty dishes," Ripley said.

He then left to buy food for Asaid and his father and himself, only to return to find that Salah had washed the dishes for him in thanks.

Politics surrounding the war in Iraq didn't become an issue, Salah and Ripley said.

"It crossed my mind, but it didn't stop me because I was on a mission to save my child," Salah said.

Ripley believes the program will do more to promote the oft-overlooked acts of goodwill the United States has done in the region.

"We like to think of this program as an ambassadorial program as much as a medical program," Ripley said.

Asaid and Salah stayed with Ripley until Dec. 19, when he went to the hospital for treatment on the 21st. He was the last of the children to receive treatment, according to the hospital's Web site.

Instead of returning to Ripley's home, Asaid and Salah went to stay at the home of Denville resident Aref Assaf, also a former Rotary Club President and  member in that town and a well-known member of the Arab community. He is also the president of the American Arab Forum

Assaf, who is Palestinian-born and speaks Arabic, could better communicate with the guests. He has also hosted ailing visitors from other countries while they receive treatment in the United States.

"It's such a beautiful effort," Assaf said.

Within hours of arriving at Assaf's home on Tuesday, Asaid was playing video games with Assaf's children in their spacious basement. Video games had become Asaid's only pastime in Iraq, after not being allowed to play outdoors with other children because of his frailty.

Assaf and Ripley said they plan to take the father and son to New York City to see sights like the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty.

But on Tuesday, it was enough for Salah to see his son enjoying himself again, and with a new lease on life.

"Words cannot describe the happiness in my heart," said his father, Salah. "I am thrilled."

Iraq complications

Before the war, under the regime of Saddam Hussein, such procedures were available in Iraq to one of two classes of people there.

"The very rich and the rest of us are poor," Asaid's father, Salah, a member of the military police in Baghdad, said.

"We were told not to even bother to have the procedure performed on him, that he was too old," Salah said.

After the war, the class problem remained, though it became moot. By then, most of the best doctors had fled the country, Salah said.

As his son's condition worsened, Salah said his hope had begun to fade. Asaid has not attended school in three years because he has become so weak that doctors there feared that any germs from other children might kill him. He soon became physically exhausted to walk.

"That was the worst part," Salah said. "Watching our child die in front of us."

Then, the program seeking children with birth defects for treatment was publicized by the U.S. military throughout Iraq. Salah jumped at the chance.

After initial tests, Asaid was chosen to go to Amman, Jordan, where he was again tested by doctors there. Soon after, they were called back to Jordan to get their visas.

The next stop was America.

Hospital outreach

Through its Operation Iraqi Hearts, the hospital has performed such operations on more than 500 children around the world in the past 15 years.

"When you look into a heart, it's not a Muslim heart, it's not a Jewish heart. We are all the same," Dr. Samuel Weinstein, a pediatric heart surgeon, said Dec. 16 upon the arrival of the four Muslim children: three boys, Wsam Rabea, 11, Abed, 14, and Sivar Mohammed, 6; and a girl, Ashjan Khaled, 12.

Rotary Club's Gift of Life International helped arrange for them to go to Jordan for treatment. Doctors there determined they needed surgery in the United States.

The Rotary program paid for the hospital stays, along with the Rachel Cooper Foundation. An open-heart operation costs as much as $100,000.

Asaid was born with a partial atrio-ventricular canal, meaning the dividing membranes that form the four chambers of a normal heart had holes in them, circulating too much blood through the boy's lungs. The boy also had substantial damage to his bicuspid valve and mitral valve, Ripley said.

Asaid was not diagnosed with the defect until age eight, about the same time his father said he stopped growing, and actually began to weaken and shrink, though his heart is larger than that of an adult. Today, the 14-year-old only stands a little over four feet tall.

To correct the defect, surgeons crafted membranes out of Gore-Tex and repaired the valves of his heart.