Two Brothers, Two Surgeries, One Heartwarming Story
It takes a big heart to travel from the comfortable state of the art Sheba Medical Center to perform heart surgery in underdeveloped Nigeria. Thankfully for two Nigerian brothers, Sheba’s Dr. David Mishali has a big heart.
Dr. Mishali, Director of The Edmond J. Safra International Congenital Heart Center at Sheba, recently headed his third trip Nigeria with a team of fellow volunteer Sheba experts. They had a list of several children in need of urgent heart surgeries. When they met the brother of one of the scheduled patients, an eighth emergency surgery was quickly added to the schedule.
Eleven year old, Fuaz had joined his parents on the 500 km trip to accompany his little brother Fuad for his scheduled heart surgery. Noticing that Fuaz appeared unwell, the Sheba team decided to examine him too, discovering that he was suffering from a mortal congenital heart defect. To save his life, the Israeli doctors overturned their busy schedules to perform an urgent surgery on him. Were it not for the vital intervention of Sheba pediatric heart surgeons and the rest of the staff, the two brothers would likely have lived for only a few more days.
In addition to Fuaz and Fuad's successful surgeries, the team of nine of Sheba’s best medical staff from the Edmond and Lily Safra Children Hospital, operated on six more young patients. The Sheba team headed home with warmed hearts and the children returned home with healthy ones.
Dr. David Mishali, Director of Sheba’s Department of Pediatric & Congenital Cardiothoracic Surgery, headed his first trip in 2013 with a mission to repair the heart defects of Nigerian children, one of the leading causes of childhood mortality in the region.
While he hoped the mission would be a medical success, he didn’t anticipate how it would affect him and change the course of his life’s work. Now, four years later the mission has expanded from training local medical teams and treating patients with heart defects to launching a new Israel Center for Disaster Medicine and Humanitarian Response at Sheba Medical Center.
Dr. Elhanan Bar-On, Head of the new Center, says “Sending a team of our doctors to Nigeria was part of our humanitarian actions throughout the world this year. We currently lead other projects in Uganda, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea, Mongolia, Niger and Turkmenistan. Everywhere, our teams set themselves up to treat local patients and, most importantly, to train the local doctors, in collaboration with different national and international bodies.”
In an effort to continue their work in bringing hope and healthy hearts to Nigeria, the new Israel Center for Disaster Medicine and Humanitarian Response at Sheba Medical Center is currently implementing a five-year plan with a goal to establish a university hospital, located between the capital city Abuja and Lagos.
Dr. David Mishali shares: “We are bringing the world’s most advanced medicine to a place where the level of life is the most primitive one could imagine. From trip to trip, we can already see the considerable progress. It is impossible to describe with words the incredible life adventure we are being a part of.”
For brothers Fuaz and Fuad, the Sheba’s innovation saved their lives. For Sheba's medical staff, caring knows no boarders. The ‘big heart’ of Sheba Medical Center continues to touch lives in Israel and around the world.
