In the days before doctors were scheduled to repair her shattered skull earlier this month, Noora Afif Abdulhameed occasionally talked about what was going to happen to her. The words would tumble out all at once, in one sentence, in between the games and laughs that blocked out the fear.
“I think surgery Friday,” the 7-year-old Iraqi girl would say to her friend Susi Eggenberger, an Arundel resident who has been like a mother to her during her stay in Maine.
“Tomorrow surgery.”
“It’s been on her mind a lot,” Eggenberger said the day before the surgery. “Needing a few more hugs today.”
As scary as the prospect of brain surgery was to Noora and her father, Afif Abdulhameed Otaiwi, it was what they had been waiting for since being flown to Portland five months ago by No More Victims, a nonprofit group that brings war-injured Iraqi children to the United States for treatment.
On Dec. 11, doctors were just 24 hours away from repairing the damage inflicted by an American sniper’s bullet two years ago in Noora’s hometown of Heet. The bullet made a large hole in Noora’s skull and destroyed her cerebral membrane. In several operations in Iraq, doctors removed pieces of bone and covered the gaping wound with skin from Noora’s thigh to temporarily protect her brain.
But to be whole again, Noora needed replacement “bone” attached to her skull, a prosthetic that would be with her the rest of her life.
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