The snow was thick and all around them and they had only a 10- or 15-minute window to get the helicopter onto the ground, get Amenah and her mother to the checkpoint at the border, and into the arms of the American team there. A few handshakes and hugs, some prayers, and off they went, disappearing into the snow. At that point, all Kevin could do was pray that all would be well. He had time for that. He was snowed in and couldn’t go back to Haditha himself for two days.
* * *
Gary White sat in the lead vehicle and waited. They all looked out the windows and watched. Glenn Susskind was in the medical vehicle parked behind theirs. The third vehicle, parked behind that, one the Blackwater men referred to as a “bump” vehicle, was along just in case anything happened to one of the other two.
He looked up at the dark clouds and was glad he wasn’t the one in a four-hour helicopter ride. Snow swirled around them and covered the ground and had begun to drift.
“I thought it never snowed here,” he said.
“It doesn’t,” the interpreter said. “Not like this, anyway. I haven’t seen anything like this in years.” She was another part of the puzzle Blackwater had already helped fix when the original interpreter they’d arranged for didn’t work out. The Blackwater guys had also helped Glenn get all the extra medical supplies he needed too—oxygen, food, water, even IV fluids.
Now they waited, and watched it snow.
The 280 miles from Amman to the Jordanian border had taken three-and-a-half hours after leaving at 4:30 a.m. When they’d come to each of the many checkpoints, vehicles had queued up in long lines, but those checking the vehicles had moved the barriers and waved the Blackwater caravan through each time. Going back was going to be a whole different can of beans with all this snow.
Then began a scene like out of a TV show. First they saw the lights, and then the shapes of two helicopters emerged from the blur of falling snow. One of the helicopters eased to the ground. The other continued to circle above, keeping a tight and secure perimeter. It waited for the helicopter on the ground to empty.
Gary and Glenn got out of their vehicles and went to the checkpoint with the Blackwater team and the interpreter to greet the mother and daughter. As they moved through the snow, Kevin Jarrard was grinning like it was Christmas. They could see relief on his face too, and the hugs all around were firm and genuine. The other helicopter spun and took off. Kevin sure smiled a lot for someone who was going to be stuck on the ground there for a while.
Glenn and the female Navy corpsman, a medic from Kevin’s team, were both taking a quick look at Amenah and assessing her, exchanging information, and the interpreter was helping with the Arabic. Amenah was blue. She had a runny nose and all the typical signs of an upper respiratory infection. She had a fever. Through the interpreter, they learned that this was not how she usually was. So they’d been brought a child who was sick on top of being sick. They were well dressed for the cold and snow but Amenah was very dehydrated. They checked her blood pressure and pulse and oxygen saturation. Her sats (saturations) were low, lower than they apparently had been day to day. The stress and whatever infection she had going on was getting to her. It was time they started back to Amman.
“Oh, and one other thing,” the Navy medic said, “The mother is diabetic. Here’s her insulin.”
“Great,” Glenn said. He’d been hoping to meet a physician and get an extensive report. But it was what it was. Gary was already starting to watch how she moved, considering whether she was going to have trouble handling the plane rides or walking through airports.
Kevin and his group had turned and now scurried back to their helicopter, which had shut down its prop, a sign they were probably not going to try to fly back to Haditha that day.
Glenn, Gary, Amenah, her mother, the interpreter, and Lisa Van Wye, Janet Jarrard’s nurse friend who Kevin had promised would be a female chaperone, all loaded into the medical vehicle, and when everyone was inside, the small caravan turned and started back toward Amman in what was already half a foot of snow with more coming down.
In addition to snacks, fresh fruit, Gatorade, and other supplies for the road, Glenn had also brought along a small DVD player, along with a couple of Disney DVDs like Mickey Mouse. That entertained Amenah enough for Glenn to assess her as they rolled along.
Still, the journey back was long. Perhaps it felt more so because Amenah was tired, agitated, and cranky, as any child that age with a fever and a runny nose would be, on top of travel fatigue and not being able to catch her breath. Put a child like that in a crowded Suburban, her mother at constant arm’s reach, for almost four hours and it’s nobody’s idea of a jolly time.
They breathed a collective large sigh when they pulled up at the five-star InterContinental Hotel, one of the finest in Amman, where Blackwater had made arrangements. The staff had been carefully preprepared for their arrival. They put them in rooms in the center of a hallway. There were no other guests in that whole hallway. They had cleared the hallway at Blackwater’s request. It was quite secure. Amenah and her mother were in one room, and Glenn and Gary had the adjoining rooms. Once settled, they could do a better assessment on Amenah, and start working on getting the fever down, getting her hydrated, and giving her some cough medicine. They did everything they could to prepare her for travel, while trying to be the least invasive as possible. They had strong concerns because now she had a cold and was even that much sicker.
Glenn made a call to the Vanderbilt hospital and spoke with Dr. Thomas Doyle, a pediatric cardiologist who would be working with Dr. Karla Christian. Glenn told him, “Hey, this is not the picture that we’ve had painted. When we get back, you need to be ready for a really sick kid, not a semihealthy one.”
From their assessment at the hotel, they knew that Amenah was going to require oxygen, especially once the plane gained enough altitude to pressurize. There was no way they could carry enough oxygen for a 14-hour flight. The flight would be stressful for all, but especially for the two-year-old.
When Lisa Van Wye, Gary White, Glenn Susskind, Amenah, her mother, and their Blackwater escort got to the airport, they were told at the ticket counter that Amenah needed to see the airline’s doctor to get her health certified. They were escorted quite a distance, through what looked to Glenn like the bowels of the airport, to where a doctor examined Amenah, said she was okay to fly, and he gave them authorization to take oxygen onto the plane. Then they passed through multiple security stations and found that on the plane, a male flight attendant on the Royal Jordanian Airlines is the lead person on each flight. He also makes a determination of whether or not anybody can get on the flight, and he reports to the pilot, who gets to make a determination again about if anybody can get on the flight.
Once they had those hurdles behind them, they tried to upgrade Amenah to get her in First Class, but that didn’t work out. They all sat in the Coach section, though they got a whole row, all the way in the back. Most of the stewardesses, including the steward, didn’t speak English at all, except one who had family in the states and was very fluent. Because they were without an interpreter, her presence was very helpful. Another passenger, who was Jordanian but was an American psychiatrist, a doctor, helped them with the translation issues too.
They had the oxygen generators, but knew they needed one to get them from Chicago to Nashville. They hoped that about 8 hours of oxygen in the generators would be enough for a 14-hour flight. They hoped that they would be able to wean her a little bit at take off and landing, so she wouldn’t need as much oxygen. That did not work out to be the case.
They watched her pulse oximeter the whole way, and her oxygen would get very low, low to the point where she would actually start getting a little bit sluggish and a little bit air hungry. So they opted to leave her on a higher concentration of oxygen through the beginning of the flight, hoping they would get her to fall asleep and decrease her oxygen needs. That also didn’t work out.
Seven hours into the flight, Glenn and Gar
y realized they would not have enough oxygen, so their backup plan became to utilize some of the airplane’s oxygen. The steward wasn’t happy about that, but they were able to convince him that they didn’t need to use all of the plane’s oxygen. They could probably get by with one or two tanks. So they used what would be the emergency oxygen for passengers. They had to manipulate the tanks somewhat. The plane’s administration system was completely different from anything they had seen before. Glenn managed to rig up something that would get her oxygen the whole way home, and they literally finished their last liter of oxygen as they were landing in Chicago.
They didn’t really have a contingency to go to a Chicago hospital, but they had a contingency in case she got very ill and they had to fly her on an air ambulance from Chicago to Nashville. They checked her again, and though she was cranky, tired, and feverish, they deemed her strong enough for one more flight. They headed for the airplane where they had a battery-operated oxygen generator waiting for the Chicago to Nashville part of the trip.
* * *
Deanna Dolan, with World Relief, their Arabic interpreter Zainab, Pastor Steve Berger of Grace Chapel Church in Lieper’s Fork, Tennessee, along with Kelly Jarrard, Kevin’s wife, and her four children were there at the Nashville airport to greet Amenah, her mother, Lisa, Gary, Glenn, and their Blackwater escort. Several news crews from varied media were on hand too, now that it was safe to talk about the effort to save Amenah. When Amenah’s mother saw Kelly, she went to the mother and four kids and gave each a warm hug and kiss. She said it was from Major Jarrard back in Iraq, who had showed her pictures and said he missed them very much.
The news stations wanted footage and their stories, but Deanna thought Amenah did not look well at all, so the welcoming group sought to keep everything low key. Amenah’s lips were blue, her face blue. She looked like she needed oxygen. Still, she tottered across and into the pastor’s arms. Maha looked exhausted and overwhelmed, but pleased that so many people wanted to be supportive.
With a few last words of care from the extraction team, Deanna, Steve, and Zainab took the mother and daughter to the Bergers’ home, which sits on five acres, with a river that winds through the back of the property, surrounded by the 43 acres of the church grounds and then several farms of over 200 acres, all very secluded and private.
That evening, Amenah seemed to be getting so little oxygen in her bloodstream that it was amazing she was functioning at all. Deanna and the Bergers wondered how she could even be conscious. And she did pass out a couple of times that night. The mother would just splash water on her face. For the mother, that was kind of normal. That’s all she’d known for that child since she was born. So the mother wasn’t freaking out, but Steve and Sarah had to hold their emotions in check. They were scared, afraid that the little girl was going to die.
* * *
On January 24, 2008, at 11:00 a.m., Amenah arrived at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt for a chest X-ray and initial exam to diagnose her heart problem. She was very tired and cranky. Deanna knew Amenah had only gotten about three hours of sleep. Maha seemed tired too, but serene. Her daughter was finally going to get the kind of help she so desperately needed. Maha greeted all the new strangers with warmth. Her interpreter, though, told Deanna that Maha was afraid. She worried about Amenah and what could happen at the hospital. All along the way, mother and child were reassured through their interpreter that she would not experience anything painful today—they just wanted some special pictures to see what was wrong with Amenah’s heart.
In the Pediatric Cardiology Clinic, Dr. Karla Christian, after finding more complications and additional infections, especially did not like what she saw from the child’s first-ever chest X-ray. Her colleague, Dr. Thomas Doyle, and the staff performed an echocardiogram. After the tests, Doyle called a medical interpreter together with the interpreter who had been working with the family and explained to Amenah’s mother what they’d found. Amenah’s heart was not only backward, but, in addition, the blood flow to her lungs was restricted and her major arteries were out of place. Because of the stress of travel, a fever she was running, and an oxygen level that was very low, they placed her in an intensive care unit. Steve and Sarah Berger, the host family, and Deanna Dolan made sure that Amenah and her mother got some culturally appropriate food and walked them to settle into their room in the main hospital.
Dr. Christian told the mother and those who had come with Amenah, “She will require a complex open heart surgery with significant risk.” They first had to get the child healthy enough for an operation. An aspect of the procedure they planned also took into consideration what kind of medical care the girl would get when she returned home. They would have to do everything they could to make sure she was as self-sustaining as possible.
In the week before her operation, Amenah lost her blue tinge and began to show a deep dimple in her right cheek that appeared when she giggled. She waved vigorously at visitors and said, “Bye,” or “Habebi,” which means sweetheart in Arabic. Her parted hair was in pigtails and she clutched her stuffed toy. She was in America. She was safe.
Amenah and her mother even got a preoperation visit by the Iraqi ambassador to the United States, Samir Sumaidaie, on Sunday, January 27. The ambassador is also from Haditha. He said that efforts like this are important, especially in times of war. “War is a cruel thing. Many families get destroyed or disrupted, but there are instances where lives are saved—many instances,” Sumaidaie said. He expressed his “appreciation to the American military that never miss a chance when it is possible to save lives.”
On February 11, Amenah was well enough for the operation. The Berger family arrived at 5:30 a.m. at the Children’s Hospital with their guests, Amenah and her mother. Amenah’s mother was very quiet, obviously feeling very anxious about the surgery, but Amenah, blissfully unaware at age two, hopped onto a trike and played until she was called back to a holding room to prepare for surgery.
By 7:00 a.m., surgeon Karla Christian, M.D., anesthesiologist Brian Donahue, M.D., and several other staff members had stopped in to explain the procedure to Amenah’s mother, through the interpreter Zainab. Amenah’s mother was also told what she could expect to see when she was allowed to visit Amenah in the recovery area in the Children’s Hospital’s Pediatric Critical Care Unit. She was told Amenah would still be asleep, would be on a ventilator, and would have several tubes and wires attached to various parts of her body, as is typical for any child undergoing open heart surgery.
Maha confided in Deanna, “Is she going to make it out alive from the surgery?” Several women from the church had come to support Maha and Amenah, and Maha asked them if they would pray. They did. She relaxed and they kidded around, keeping Maha’s mind distracted.
As Dr. Doyle had put it, “Untreated, this will be a fatal condition in her young childhood.” They had to operate, and they did. Dr. Christian performed the operation, and, in effect, they had to reroute blood to her lungs. For the rest of her life, she will have only one pumping chamber instead of two. The logic was that she would be back in Iraq, where she could not get repeat attention. Doyle said, “It’s going to sustain her for the rest of her life in a village where she has little medical care or very little access to any medical personnel. That’s her only option.”
The operation was a success, and Amenah was put on a ventilator for several hours. After a critical 24 hours had passed after the surgery, the doctors announced they were optimistic Amenah would have a full recovery. Amenah was next taken to the Pediatric Critical Care Unit and soon weaned from the ventilator. By Wednesday morning, she was back to blowing kisses and waving at the nurses and staff who dropped by to check up on her.
It was not long before Amenah was well enough to return to the Bergers’ home where they had become one big family. Maha had her normal enough ups and downs, missing her culture and her family. They bought her all the food she needed to cook Iraqi meals. She would sit on the kitchen floo
r at Steve and Sarah’s house and cook, and teach Sarah how to cook. She even made her own yoghurt, which she stored in the refrigerator. Deanna said, “She wanted to go shopping a lot. And we would take her shopping.
In fact, when she went back, I don’t think she could fit everything in her suitcase that she got.”
A little more than two weeks after her surgery, Amenah came back for a final checkup at the Children’s Hospital. Amenah had another echocardiogram, to make sure the blood flow in her heart was still running through the right pipes at the right rate—it was. Then Christian checked out the sound of her heart, checked out her scar for any signs of infections or problems, and found none.
Figure 6 Deanna Dolan and Amenah
Source: World Relief—Deanna Dolan
Little Amenah, Deanna noticed, turned out to be a ham, enjoying all the attention she was getting from the family, those at church, and the media. It tickled Deanna to see Amenah’s change from being a fussy, lethargic little girl into one full of life, who was sunny and making jokes. She had a pair of tiny sneakers that would squeak every time she walked. At church, Pastor Steve would be preaching and everyone would hear a “squeak, squeak, squeak” and the whole church would crack up. They’d fallen in love with the little girl from across the world.
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