It’s a crowded morning at Damascus University’s cardiac hospital. Families from across Syria have gathered here with their children — many in urgent need of open-heart surgery. This hospital is the only functioning public facility in the country equipped to perform such procedures, and it is staffed by just five doctors trained to carry them out. Across Syria, most health care centers have been destroyed or left to decay. The atmosphere is tense. Some children have waited months, others years, for their turn. For them, even a short delay could mean the difference between life and death.
In a cramped hospital room shared with three other families lies six-month-old Ahed al-Ahmad. He was born with a ventricular septal defect — a hole in the wall separating the heart’s chambers that makes it harder for blood to circulate properly. Ahed needs emergency open-heart surgery. It’s the family’s fifth trip to the hospital since his birth, each requiring a grueling five-hour journey.
“He needs the surgery now,” says his father, forty-three-year-old Najdat Fares al-Ahmad. Ahed’s father, holding his son gently. “The delay is harming his growth — his brain and cognitive development too.”
Private hospitals charge $7,000 to $9,000 for the procedure, a sum far beyond Najdat’s reach. He earns just $20 a month as a government-employed veterinarian.
“Ahed doesn’t understand what is happening around him,” Najdat says quietly. “We feel more pain than he does because we can’t help him — we can’t afford to take to a private hospital. I don’t even have the words.”
A week after Jacobin met Ahed, he passed away. He never received the lifesaving medical treatment he…
Auteur: Omar Hamed Beato
