Debra asks herself, "Did I give him the nine-o'clock dose?" The first time Debra saw Husse...
The first time Debra saw Hussein was last summer in a photograph. She did not know his name. All she had was his face. And it was his face that tormented her.
Iraqi doctors tried to graft skin from his leg to his face, but the surgery failed. They tried a second time with his scalp, leaving a gash across Hussein's head. In an attempt to save his left hand, they used skin from his other leg. That surgery failed, too, and they amputated Hussein's left hand.
It all started when Debra read a newspaper story last summer about Healing the Children, a non-profit group that finds medical care for children. In the past five years, doctors and hospitals in Arizona have donated surgeries, helping 43 children.
After a 20-plus year career as a nurse consultant, Debra, 49, had barely stopped working and saw this as an opportunity to use her nursing background and free time.
Debra told Healing the Children that Hussein's injuries were unlike anything she had seen before, that she didn't think she could do anything for him.
If he were her child, she told herself, she would do anything to reach out for help. When we meet someone, she thought, we are first drawn to the eyes. At least she could try to get his vision restored in the one remaining eye. She also hoped that an artificial eye could replace the one that had been destroyed.
She also contacted doctors, asking for their help. One of them, Jung Dao, an ophthalmologist, wanted to do something for the boy. Dao grew up in Vietnam during the war. He was Hussein's age when he was airlifted out of Vietnam, just days before the fall of Saigon.
Last November, when Hussein and his aunt arrived from Iraq, Debra was at the airport waiting with a quilt made especially for Hussein. Debra had run out of time to sew one herself so a group of quiltmakers from the Sew' N Vac on 35th Avenue in Phoenix made one.
She wanted a soft quilt, to feel smooth against his skin that had been scarred from burns. And she wanted texture, so that Hussein could feel that the quilt was different than clothing, in case he never regained his eyesight.
After raising two sons, Debra never imagined that the little boy from Iraq would be living in her Peoria home, in her son's old bedroom converted into a sewing room.
In the beginning, Hussein hung his head over his left shoulder as if he were looking toward the ground. Any light hitting the eye irritated the debris from the explosion. His remaining eye would weep, so Hussein kept his eye shut. Hussein needed help walking and his aunt guided him everywhere.
The day that Hussein said goodbyeto his aunt, he said goodbye to his Iraqi lifeline. She was his direct link to Iraq and to his mother and father who had stayed to take care of Hussein's brothers and sisters. In a few months, Debra picked up essential phrases in Arabic. Hussein started learning more English.
Debra arranged for a teacher to come to their home and teach Hussein the alphabet, months, days of the week and to write his name and count money. She taught him to play piano scales.
His aunt had returned to Iraq so it was Debra who waited and worried during Hussein's surgeries: a corneal transplant, a vitrectomy to clear the rock, sand and shrapnel from his eyes and a lens removal.
Even with all of his injuries from the explosion, Hussein's eyelashes are undamaged and as long and delicate as an artist's paintbrush. They frame a large brown eye that was hidden until his recent surgeries.
Before, Hussein could only see where light was coming from. He can pick out colors now. And even though he must work a Dora the Explorer puzzle within a nose-length and write his name within the same distance, this gives Debra hope.
"Hussein, don't climb that tree," Debra yells to Hussein, knowing that he could hurt himself; even with his protective plastic goggles he could break the stitches in his cornea.
A picture of Hussein with his father taken in Iraq before the explosion is wedged into the corner of a framed print of the Grand Canyon that hangs near Debra's sewing machine.
Hussein's legs dangle from the chair in the eye doctor's office. Debra straightens his collar and wants Hussein to give her his gum before Dr. Dao looks at Hussein's eye.
Her husband, Ray, is a food scientist who moonlights in a band that plays classic rock and roll. He gave Hussein a CD with Yesterday by the Beatles. By playing the song over and over, Hussein learned the words.
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