Gray’s younger sister, Rebecca, was married to surgeon Peter Grossman; Peter and his father, Richard, ran the Grossman Burn Center at Sherman Oaks Hospital, near Los Angeles. Gray knew Rebecca would not be able to resist getting involved in this case.
He picked up the phone and called his sister at home in California. “Hi, Rebecca,” he said. “Are you sitting down?”
“No,” she answered. “Actually I’m standing up. What’s going on?”
Once he told her the story, Rebecca called her husband at work. “Hi, honey,” she began. “You’re not going to believe the burn case the State Department has brought Mike.” Peter was intrigued, and once the devastating photos of Zubaida were e-mailed to him, his interest only grew. He began making arrangements as well.
Peter and Rebecca had no children, though kids were their desperate wish. With formidable energy, Rebecca approached the Children’s Burn Foundation, a California organization that raises funds for needy cases. The foundation quickly agreed to cover $300,000 worth of the costs of Zubaida’s early medical procedures.
On June 10, 2002, U.S. military physician Mike Smith, accompanied by a translator, flew with Zubaida and her father from Kabul to London via Dubai and on to Los Angeles. Afterward, they were driven to the Grossman Burn Center. When he first met Zubaida, Peter Grossman was heartened: In spite of her injuries she looked directly at him. She said “hello” in memorized English and stuck out her good arm to shake his hand. When he told her his name—“Dr. Peter”—she quietly repeated it and made the slightest switch of a smile. It was all her injured face would allow.
In the coming months, Peter’s impressions came to match those of all the other soldiers and doctors who had met Zubaida along the way. To an able-bodied person, this child’s endurance and will to live was humbling.
• • •
Early on June 14, Peter Grossman’s team prepped Zubaida for her first surgery. “Everything is going to be good,” Peter told her. Her anxious father huddled with the interpreter in the waiting room.
Peter had assembled a stellar team to assist him. They agreed that his father, Richard, would team up with Dr. Alexander Majidian to free Zubaida’s left arm from her chest. Surgeon Brian Evans would work with Peter on the first efforts to cut back scar tissue from the face, neck and chest. Since Zubaida was so young and weak, and her surgery so extensive, pediatrician Matt Young stood by. Dr. Charles Neal had the daunting task of handling the anesthesia. “There was a lot more tension than normal,” said Peter Grossman. “With Zubaida’s disfigurement, her anatomical markers were skewed; her vital structures were buried under those scars.”
A complication showed up right away: Charles Neal was unable to get a breathing tube down Zubaida’s throat because of the way her head was bent downward, pulled by burn scars. Even using the camera in a fiberoptic endoscope to guide the tube didn’t work; the contraction was too severe. With limited time before the sedation would begin to suppress Zubaida’s respiration, the pressure was on. The team had just minutes to insert the tube.
As soon as Neal had her far enough under, Peter made an incision around the chin line to cut through the bands of tightened scar tissue that were binding the chin to the chest wall. He was stunned to find a carapace of scar tissue half an inch thick; it was more like hide than skin.
The first of Zubaida’s amazing transformations had begun. As soon as the incision was made around the jaw line, her head tilted back into a normal position. Now Neal could slide the breathing tube down her airway and begin a standard gas anesthesia. During the next hour and a half, as he cut away masses of scar tissue, Peter saw a little girl emerge.
The team performed two of the most dramatic and challenging procedures at the beginning—the first to release Zubaida’s head and neck from the chest, the second to release her left arm from the torso. And a near-magical element of modern medicine came into play. The large open wounds where the scar tissue had been were carefully sprayed with Tisseel Fibrin Sealant, a complex “glue” for human surgical needs. It sealed off tiny points of bleeding and let the wounds stabilize before skin grafts were applied. In Zubaida’s case, with so little healthy skin available, every graft would need to take; the sealant gave Peter a head start.
Under the bright lights of the recovery room, Zubaida began to regain consciousness. She felt no pain, though she did have some nausea; she had the feeling of being tightly wrapped in soft blankets. As she told her father later, she was wondering, Where am I? What’s going on? Who are these strange people who look like ghosts?
Then it hit her: This is the American hospital. The men are doctors. This is part of their magic. And my face and neck don’t hurt anymore.
• • •
In the waiting room, Peter told Zubaida’s father that the operation had gone well. She would be in the hospital for the next few days, he said, until she was strong enough for the second surgery. Then grafts from her own skin would be placed over the surgical wounds.
Peter explained that after that step, they would be able to remove Zubaida’s bandages; the skin grafts, he hoped, would be safely in place. This would be a long process: There were still perhaps ten more surgeries to go.
Hasan nodded to Peter in gratitude. It’s working, he thought. The Americans are keeping their word to help my daughter.
Two days later, Rebecca Grossman came to the hospital to see Zubaida. She’d worked zealously behind the scenes to help Peter make arrangements; she also knew a host family had been found to care for Zubaida between surgeries. The family spoke Farsi, which was close enough to Zubaida’s native Dari to allow conversation. Swaddled in bandages, Zubaida talked to Rebecca through the interpreter. Her pain was minimal, she told the lady with the honey-blond hair. And she was happy that Dr. Peter kept his promise not to hurt her. Rebecca’s gentle warmth made the girl feel comfortable.
For Zubaida’s second surgery, Peter and his team delicately harvested grafts from her unburned skin. Here’s where art met science: Peter had to look at each burn area carefully, visualizing just how the wound might look in a week, a month, a year, even ten years. How would the grafted skin move with Zubaida’s body? How would it react as she grew?
He went into the OR knowing that every square centimeter of each graft was vital, both in the short run as a defense against infection and in the long run as an integrated part of her healed flesh.
The second-round work went according to plan. It was just six days after the first surgery, and now, with the new surgery, Zubaida had a good amount of grafting in place. Peter would be unwrapping the bandages to check on the skin’s progress; this was also Mohammed Hasan’s chance to see the early part of his daughter’s transformation before he had to head home to Afghanistan to care for the rest of his family, who awaited him.
Hasan watched in astonishment as Zubaida’s dressings were gently removed. He finally saw what Peter and his colleagues had accomplished. Zubaida sat on the table in front of him, shivering from the air on her skin. In some ways she still looked dreadful—bone-thin and sickly. But her face and neck were now completely free of that thick and twisted scar tissue.
Her face was recognizable; her left arm was free. To demonstrate, Peter gently took Zubaida’s arm and extended it all the way to the side and back again.
Hasan blinked. His eyes welled with tears and his throat seized up. When Peter offered Zubaida a mirror and she looked too, her eyes popped in wonder. She gazed at her father and smiled.
Hasan put a hand over his heart. He hugged Peter and heaped thanks on him without waiting for the interpreter to translate. They did magic on her, after all. The results were astonishing. She looked all patched up, but that dreadful monster of scar tissue was gone. Meanwhile, Zubaida kept smiling even though it hurt her to move her stitched-up features.
The next day Hasan kissed his daughter goodbye and returned to the airport. Within a few days, Zubaida was taken to her host family’s home in nearby Encino for three weeks of recuperation. She still
had at least eight more surgeries to go. In all, she was expected to be in America for about a year.
• • •
Zubaida’s “foster” mother was of Afghan heritage, which was comforting. But Zubaida, still such a young girl, missed her father intensely. Her face-to-face confrontation with American life had been suspended while she was in the hospital; now she was bombarded with heavily accented language, new surroundings, strangers who smiled but who barely seemed real to her. As the summer days of 2002 drifted by, Zubaida experienced mood swings and emotional outbursts that reflected all her frustration and isolation. Nightmares made her cry out in torment. Everyone struggled.
On July 3, she had her third surgery, with Peter working on her skin like a custom tailor building a full-body suit out of living fabric. Permanent grafts were taken from healthy parts of her body and blended into the surrounding skin; as time went on, they would grow with the rest of her and not betray her by going out of control like the scar tissue had earlier.
Rebecca Grossman, meanwhile, found herself drawn to Zubaida in ways she never had been with any burn center patient. Feeling the girl’s will as well as her playful spirit, Rebecca talked with Peter and with the host family. They arranged for Zubaida to spend a weekend, just the three of them, at their home in Hidden Hills. They had dogs, horses, a pool, and lots of time to share.
The visit went well—Zubaida arrived, smiling, carrying a little tote bag, and her mood stayed bright the entire time—and Peter and Rebecca began reveling in their brief role as surrogate parents. The house had a full feeling when Zubaida was around. As her healing progressed, the Grossmans took her on outings—bowling, to the beach.
Inside a Malibu cove, still careful of her condition, Zubaida played in the waves that broke on the sand. Peter and Rebecca watched as she came back to life, jumping around in the water like any other kid. It was like seeing an entire chunk of her healing process in a single afternoon. The day came, in November of that year, that Zubaida moved in with the Grossmans for the remainder of her time in America.
Not that things were perfect: So much had changed for Zubaida so fast. That first day at the Grossmans’ home, she made her way into the kitchen and curled up into the safe, cave-like space under the kitchen table.
• • •
With the Grossmans’ help, though, she was soon speaking to her father on the phone. She told him that Rebecca was enrolling her in public school while she was here. Hasan shouted with joy. “Soak up everything you can!” he said. “This is an opportunity no one here can even imagine.” In her homeland, Zubaida had never once attended school. Now she was determined to learn to speak English and to read and write Dari.
That fall, as she continued to heal, she entered the third-grade class at Round Meadow Elementary in Hidden Hills. Teacher Kerrie Benson asked her class to try to imagine being far, far away from everyone they had ever known, without family or friends. “We need to do more than just help her learn things,” she told the children. “We need to be like her family and friends, because that’s what we would want others to do for us.”
Though Zubaida was very timid, on her first day the kids argued over who would get to spend time with her. In spite of her poor English, she communicated well enough that she was soon fully enmeshed in classroom life, as well as the girls’ social group after school.
Then came the holiday season—and the day Zubaida switched from calling Peter by his first name to calling him Dad. Little hairs stood up at the base of his neck as a smile made its way across his face. He watched Zubaida for a change of expression, some acknowledgment that she knew what she’d said. Instead, she just went right on chattering away.
She seemed to do best, he realized, when she could sort things out at her own pace. And he appreciated that the shift in her name for him revealed a deepening of her personal trust—far beyond the medical trust she had placed in him from the start.
Most Valuable Player
BY W. HODDING CARTER
Greg Gadson, a lieutenant colonel in the Army’s Warrior Transition Brigade, is a natural leader—the kind of guy you’d be looking for on the battlefield. He’s also the kind of guy Mike Sullivan, wide receivers coach for the New York Giants, thought could make a difference to his losing football team.
The two men had gone to West Point together but hadn’t been in touch much afterward, until Sullivan walked into Gadson’s hospital room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, outside Washington, D.C., last June. Friends had told Sullivan that his former Army football teammate had suffered serious injuries in Iraq—resulting in both of Gadson’s legs being amputated above the knee.
“This man had suffered so much,” Sullivan recalls, “yet he was so happy to see me.” The coach, who brought his old friend a signed Giants jersey with the number 98 on it, watched as Gadson interacted with the other patients and the doctors and nurses, encouraging them all. “To see the impact he had on these people—the look in his eyes and how they responded—was overwhelming and inspirational.”
Sullivan couldn’t help but be impressed by Gadson’s enthusiasm and lack of self-pity. “He was bragging about me and talking about the Giants, and I was like, ‘Hell, I want to talk about you. How are you doing?’ ”
When the Giants were scheduled to play the Redskins in Washington three months later, Sullivan sent his friend tickets—along with a request: Would Gadson speak to the team before they took the field? Having lost the first two games of the season, the Giants had already given up 80 points and, worse, seemed to be playing with no heart. The coach felt that Gadson was the perfect person to tell the players something they needed to hear about commitment, about perseverance, about teamwork. “A lot of the guys were frustrated and searching for answers,” Sullivan says. “And I thought, This is someone who knows about pressure and sacrifice when it’s life and death, not just a game.”
• • •
Teamwork was everything to Gadson. He had played football at Indian River High School in the Tidewater region of Virginia and gone on to become a starting linebacker—No. 98—for West Point from 1986 to 1988, despite his relatively slight build of 190 pounds on a 5-foot-11 frame.
Following his graduation, Gadson, the son of a hospital pharmacist and a teacher, planned to serve his compulsory five years and get out. But after tours in the Balkans and Afghanistan, he found himself hooked. “Serving my country is important,” he says, “but for me it’s about being a soldier, being there for each other in the biggest sense of the word. I love being part of that team.”
Last May, in Baghdad, Gadson was returning from memorial services for two soldiers from his battalion when a bomb tore apart the truck he was riding in, knocking him clear of the vehicle and leaving him on the side of the road, bleeding and slipping in and out of consciousness.
He awoke ten days later at Walter Reed; a week later, after complications, his left leg was amputated, then his right. “I knew what had to be done even before the doctors told me,” he says.
• • •
The night before the Redskins game, Gadson spoke with no script, from his heart. “You have an obligation not only to your employer but to each other to do your best,” he told the Giants. “You’re playing for each other. When you find a way to do things greater than you thought you could, something you couldn’t do as an individual, a bond is formed that will last forever.”
He told the team how much it had meant to him when his friends from West Point rallied around him in the hospital, and reminded them how powerful a team really is and how much stronger adversity would make them. “It’s not about what happens to you in life,” he said. “It’s about what you do about it. It’s about making the most of all your opportunities because I’m here to tell you, it can end in a flash.”
When he finished speaking, the room was silent. “You could hear a pin drop,” Sullivan says. And then it erupted in a standing ovation.
“You see a guy go through the things that he has, and he’s in suc
h good spirits,” says Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress. “I’ve never met somebody like that. I was like, Wow, I have a little ankle injury. I have to go out there and give it my best.”
• • •
The Giants invited Gadson to watch the game from the sidelines the next day. When Burress scored the winning touchdown, he ran to Gadson and placed the ball in his lap. “All I thought about when I made that touchdown was that I wanted to find him and give him that football,” Burress says.
The Giants went on to win their next ten road games. Gadson joined up with the team at the playoffs in Tampa, and again, they won.
Later, at the NFC championship game against Green Bay, the honorary co-captain sat on the sidelines in the subzero weather instead of in the heated box seat reserved for him. This time, it was Corey Webster who gave Gadson a football, after intercepting a pass from star Packers quarterback Brett Favre near the end of the game. The Giants won in overtime, 23–20, and the ball wound up becoming a piece of history. It turned out to be the last NFL pass Favre threw; he announced his retirement in March.
• • •
The Super Bowl was next, and the team flew Gadson, his wife, Kim, and their two children—Gabriella, 15, and Jaelen, 14—to Phoenix for the game against the New England Patriots, who’d had an undefeated season and were widely favored to win. The night before the contest, Gadson again addressed the players. And for the crowning touch on what became a legendary season, the Giants won, 17–14, their first Super Bowl victory in more than a decade.
“He is a powerful man with a powerful spirit,” says Giants head coach Tom Coughlin. “And that is really what he gave us: the idea that the spirit rises above all these adverse conditions.”
Physically, Gadson is making remarkable progress. He spends four hours a day in rehab, learning, among other things, to use prosthetic legs equipped with Bluetooth technology. Computer chips in each leg send signals to motors in Gadson’s artificial joints so his knees and ankles move in a coordinated fashion. He is one of only two double amputees to use this technology, which was designed for single amputees. He uses a wheelchair or two canes most of the time but can also walk without support for short distances.
Reader's Digest Soldier Stories Page 17
