Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - On the first day of his six-day mission to a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan in January, Dr. M. Bassel Atassi met a 26-year-old woman with severe back pain.
"She had been losing a lot of weight," he said.
Access to medical care is limited at any refugee camp, but particularly inside Zataari, where an estimated 100,000 people have been eking out an existence since 2012.
Atassi, a hematologist oncologist at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park, was able to get the woman, named Tahaini, enough tests to have a medical work-up done.
"I saw her my last day and had to tell her the diagnosis was Stage 4 breast cancer," he said.
Even if Tahaini were in the United States, her prognosis would not be good. But medical care and medications might extend her life another four or five years, Atassi said.
There, in the enclosed desert camp where refugees, unable to leave or work, exist on stipends, Atassi estimates Tahaini will live a few more months. He got a text a few days ago informing him that the woman's cancer had spread to her brain.
Tahaini's story is just one of many sad tales Atassi heard on the mission, which he organized through the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS).
With 70 participants, at the time it was the largest contingent of volunteer doctors, nurses, students and health care professionals to visit the camp. A trip this month surpassed that with 85 members.
Many of the men and women who went along on the January mission hailed from the Chicago area, including several from Little Company, including social worker Josh Margaritondo and pulmonologist Dr. Mohammed Z. Sahloul. Dr. Anupama Shivaraju, a cardiologist with Advocate Heart Institute in Oak Lawn, also joined the mission, as did Dr. Riad Alzeim, an internist from Orland Park. Others came from Texas, New York, Michigan and the United Kingdom.
Local medical facilities donated equipment and medications, Atassi said.
He said it took two months of "working my second full-time job" to coordinate the task. "But it went very well."
The volunteers saw 5,000 patients, performing 300 dental procedures, 350 pediatric blindness screenings and nine plastic surgeries.
Atassi said the trip also marked the first time a mission was able to conduct cardiac care, thanks to the participation of cardiac specialist Shivaraju, who treated 20 patients, installing stents and providing other cardiac relief.
Shivaraju went back this month and treated another 38 patients.
"Both times," Shivaraju said, "90 percent of those patients had really bad blockages in their coronary arteries. Not just in one, but in two or three. So they definitely needed this procedure."
Shivaraju said, generally in times of war, people need mostly primary and trauma care.
"But here's a situation where these refugees have been in the camp for (nearly) five years now, and they have a lot more chronic problems and need more specialized care," she said.
People who live in some Middle Eastern and Asian countries are already prone to more cardiac issues, she said, primarily because of poor diet and heavy tobacco use. Even those who live in the United States are at a much higher risk but, she said, in this country there is access to primary care, enabling doctors to control patients' blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol.
"These people in the camps are sitting there with uncontrolled coronary disease, which is advancing more rapidly because they are not getting preventative treatments," she said.
"Right now, we don't see any end to this refugee crisis," she said. "Hopefully, these people will get to go home eventually, but for now they're basically getting subpar health care. We were basically treating people in their 40s, 50s and 60s for conditions we normally see in people who are in their 70s and 80s."
Through SAMS, Shivaraju said, the doctors were able to get access to a cardiac catheter lab near the camp. They compiled a list of at-risk patients on whom they could perform angiograms at the nearby hospital. Following an overnight stay, the patients were returned to the camp.
"I was very impressed with how organized everything was," she said.
On the January trip, she said she focused mainly on the work. But when she went back this month, she said she made time to gather personal anecdotes.
She spoke with a 57-year-old man from Damascus, Syria, who had worked for a passport agency before the bombing started. She said he told her he once watched a plane several bombs about 200 meters from his home. It killed about 30 people, mostly women and children, in less than an hour.
And there was a 34-year-old man from Homs, Syria, who had worked in the tiling business. Married with four children, he told Shivaraju that he and his family fled that country in 2012. Despite seeing such horrors as a pile of 400 burned bodies, Shivaraju said he told her he still has hope that his children will have more opportunities than he had.
Shivaraju said a lot of the children in the camp don't know there's a world outside of it.
"The living conditions are horrific. Hot, desert, no air conditioning in summer. When it rains, everything turns to mud. For somebody to live under those conditions for (almost) five years, it's just really devastating. That's what I want people to understand," she said. "This is not just a political thing. The victims are really innocent human beings. They are people no different than any one of us here."
Atassi said although many of the refugees' stories were weighted in sorrow and suffering, the preventative medical work led to some happy endings.
"We had a patient in his 40s who had heart disease and couldn't afford treatment," he said. "He had waited one year with chest pains for someone to come and help him.
"Dr. Shivaraju was able to put a stent in and he has recovered completely," Atassi said. "There were other stories like that, too."
Atassi, who is of Syrian descent, said although he has done other humanitarian work in Turkey and Lebanon, the Zaatari trip affected him deeply.
"Big time. The Syrian crisis is one of the worst in our lifetime," he said. "We have not experienced wars like this. There is a population of 25 million in this country and almost half of them have left, and another 7 million are displaced internally. They've left their home, city and village to head to safer locations. They went to border countries like Jordan and Lebanon and Iraq. They went to Greece and Turkey."
Jordan is now home to some 2.5 million refugees, he said. The Zaatari camp, made famous by actress Angelina Jolie's visit, is the second-largest camp in the world.
"It is becoming the fourth-largest city in Jordan," Atassi said.
Despite the enormity of the camp and of the problem, Atassi said while there he heard one sentiment repeatedly: "Everyone talks about when they will go home."
Conversely, Atassi said as the mission volunteers were packing up, "We all kept asking ourselves: 'When am I coming back?'"
He's hoping to head to a camp along the Greece-Macedonia border in July, and possibly back to Jordan in September. He is also organizing another large mission for January.
"Everybody who goes just wants to help," he said. "If I start telling you heartbreaking stories, I won't be able to stop."
On the last day of the mission, he gathered the group in a room at their hotel.
"We wanted to share experiences. I called it a closing ceremony," he said. "We all promised that when we got back home, we would tell the world about the refugees.
"We're going to be messengers and advocates for these people."
*Chicago Tribune
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