MELBOURNE, April 18 – A little girl who faced a lifetime of sickness will return home to Palestine after Australian doctors repaired damage caused by a horrific accident, the Australian Associated Press (AAP) reports. Hala Dawwas was four when she was crushed between a car and a brick wall.
Her pelvis was shattered and her bladder dislodged. She was taken to the local hospital but they could only perform a crude reconstruction and Hala continually suffered infections. Her body no longer functioned normally. Hala’s mother Tahane then made a frantic search for specialised help.
She was told four times by hospitals around the world that they would attempt to repair what was too grave and too complex for the hospital in Palestine. But after assessing Hala’s little body each of them reneged. “They said it was too complicated,” Dawwas told AAP. “It was maybe the hardest case they came across ever.” On Hala’s seventh birthday last year, paediatric surgeon Neil McMullin, at Melbourne’s Cabrini Catholic Hospital, gave them hope. Almost a year later, as Hala looked forward to returning home, he said the case was like nothing he had ever seen before.
“We didn’t have clear information as to the nature of the damage that had been caused by the accident,” McMullin said. But he thought Cabrini Hospital would be able to help. The Children First Foundation flew Hala and her mother to Melbourne to begin the process. Hala needed four operations and spent 42 nights in hospital, an intensive schedule that would not have been possible without the hospital’s outreach programme. On Wednesday Hala presented McMullin with a card to say thankyou for making her better. “They fix everything,” she told reporters. She wants to be a doctor when she grows up. —
BERNAMA
