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The Hanoudi Tragedy: The Second Anniversary |
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Monday, 27 March 2006 |
My son Nazar was 37 years old, when he was working with an American military unit in this city as a contractor since the end of the war. He was helping them with minor repairs of their facilities, and providing them with food, water and medicines nothing big or covert, everything above board and in friendship. On the morning of March 29, 2004, he was stupidly and un-provocatively shot by an American soldier, the facts about the incident and the circumstances under which it happened are still unexplained to us by anybody. Nazar was operated at the site and on the same evening was transferred to the American military hospital in the green zone [CSH 31] where he had many operations and many complications. During his stay there and a major catastrophe in a leading Iraqi hospital here to which he was referred from the American one for a hemodialysis that was a complete failure and resulted in a very severe brain damage contributing to his current very serious condition. He was discharged from the American hospital after about five weeks still in an extremely serious condition, because they said that they couldn’t do anything for him. My son Nazar is now in an advanced vegetative state.
It was few minutes after 2:30 PM on that fateful day, I was back home a bit earlier and the phone was ringing it was young man who said that he was a translator to the unit with Nazar was working with, he said that my son fell from a ladder and has broken his ankle and has undergone a simple operation, nothing serious you can come to see him if you like. I sped to the camp with my son in-law and we had a big trouble getting inside, but after an hour I was escorted inside and was taken to where he was. I found him in a narrow understaffed badly equipped room, which they called the intensive care unit [ICU], and there the boy was laying on an old bed with one nurse with him and with a lot of tubes and wires connected to him. A few seconds later a small very young badly dressed man came and told me that my son was shot by an American soldier few hours earlier when he was trying to go into the camp to deliver a small engineering piece which was needed by the soldiers and that he was operated and is now still under the effect of the anesthetic. The bullet a 10 cm long piece has entered through his left loin, it has damaged his left kidney amongst other nearby structures, the bullet is still inside him and is lying behind his pancreas, but he is recovering nicely. I was told that I should go home and come and see him tomorrow morning. During this conversation I noticed few Americans in military garb, very serious and behaving very importantly and I was told that these fellows were investigating my son’s shooting but they did not talk to me and I didn’t also.
I arrived at the camp next morning again with my son in-law, but this time it was more difficult to go inside. There was at the check point a very arrogant sergeant was in charge of the check point and was behaving like a prison guard, shouting and aggressively shoving people with the butt of his gun and was at times threatening me with his weapon but after more than an hour sergeant Gandhi a young very polite friend of my son who was present in the makeshift hospital yesterday came to me and said that my son was referred to the green zone hospital last night because he had a very serious bleeding from his injured kidney, you can go and see him there. We hurried to the green zone, there it was a bit more civilized at the check point but we were told that it was past hospital visiting time come back tomorrow and if your son is there you will be escorted inside, back home, I was back there with my wife and daughter next morning and at nine an American soldier arrived who carried a list of the patients, my sons name was there his hospital number was 647. We walked the twenty minutes to the hospital and there he was in the hospital’s ICU unit. The place was a better one than yesterday’s, clean well equipped and evidently well staffed, my son was connected to a lot of tubes and wires, he was drowsy and tired but we were able to exchange few words with him. Few minutes later a nice looking young lady who was in a military uniform came to us and said that she was the hospital’s surgeon, she had operated the night before the last on my son as an emergency because of a very severe bleeding from his injured left kidney. The operation lasted few hours and it entailed removing his severely damaged left kidney and his spleen, the suturing of few diaphragm wounds and those of injured nearby structures.
The vegetative state as a manifestation of a damaged brain is as complex and difficult to understand as the brain itself, but few facts are well known. The brain depends during a healthy life time on a very delicately controlled supply of oxygen and carbohydrates, any deprivation of these basic essentials and even for a very short time results in serious damage to the brain but it is also well known that the different parts of the brain react selectively to this deprivation, its upper parts the so called the cortical mantle is the most sensitive and can stand oxygen and carbohydrate deprivation for an extremely short time which results in the loss of the higher brain functions like perception, cognition movement and talking, whilst the ones below it the mid brain are a bit more resilient and can bear up with the deprivation for a bit longer and the more automatic and sub-conscious functions like breathing, heart beating and bowel movements remain. This state of affairs used to be called clinical death but less cruelly a vegetative state, because a person in a vegetative state is not dead. You are dead when your heart beat and your respiration stops and the electrical activity in your brain is extinguished, a person in a vegetative state is a critically ill patient who needs highly specialized nursing and physiotherapy a very special medical and feeding regimes which has to be tailored according to his or her clinical condition because this is a very variable state some are mild and some are more serious and severe. My son’s case is a fairly advanced one, he does not move or is able to talk, he breathes through a tracheotomy is fed by a naso-gastric tube, his nutritional requirements and his drugs are brought from outside the country, because they are very specific and are not available here. When he was discharged from the American hospital we took him to a small private hospital in Baghdad for four weeks and then back to his house when we started, his mother, my daughter and myself to take care of him ourselves, during July of last year things at home were becoming intolerable, no water, no electricity, no security so with a generous help from a Kurd from Arbil a Christian we were able to take him to Amman hoping for a better care and hoping for a miracle.
Miracles seem to happen only very rarely nowadays because the boy is still In a very serious condition and we are absolutely exhausted. His nursing care, his food and medicines and his physiotherapeutic regime are costing a fortune, I have not made after 5o years in medicine any money and I have not been doing any ophthalmology during the long nightmarish months of our ordeal. Fortunately, we are being supported by few of our relatives and friends in our difficult and very stressful task. In an age in which training in the arts of greed and lying has replaced empathy and love, but there are still few very kind and generous people like the one I have told you about and an astonishingly generous and compassionate few who are insisting on anonymity. I want to tell them that I am really humbled by their kindness and generosity.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
Najeeb Hanoudi
Sunday March 26, 2006
Baghdad/Iraq
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