Traveling in search of a miracle

The locals urged him to go see a healer in Baghdad.

Thabit Al-Alousi was 6 years old when an accident deformed his spine and left him a hunchback. The local hospital had been unsuccessful in treating his back, so now he was turning to a medicine man ““ a villager whose idea of healing was to put his heavy weight on Al-Alousi’s small spine to straighten him out.

But it only left him more broken.

A current international patient at the UCLA Medical Center, Al-Alousi’s life has been a search for treatment ““ first to heal a spinal injury he said has been the source of ridicule throughout his life and now to treat an enlarged prostate and small lungs that have limited him to periods of immobility.

He has tried Iraqi and Egyptian doctors. Recently, for his prostate, he has tried British and French physicians. Then there were Swedish, then Italian.

But in 2005, doctors in London, where he currently lives, recommended the UCLA Medical Center, which has a reputation for having a strong urology department.

Al-Alousi is part of the 1 percent of UCLA patients who are from outside the United States.

And at 64 years old, he said what he has found at the UCLA hospital is something he has been unable to find elsewhere.

“Mercury? Mercury? … My English not really good. (The word that means) something is good, very good,” Al-Alousi said, inclining his head toward patient coordinator Nels Christianson.

“Miracle?” Christianson suggested.

“Miracle,” Al-Alousi said. “The miracle what happened for me.”

It is a miracle, he believes, that his sixth surgery at UCLA allows him to breathe, walk and urinate once more.

A miracle that, after suicide attempts, an escape from his home in Iraq and countless fruitless visits to doctors, he is still alive today.

Leaving to live

Doctors were afraid to touch him.

Because of the formation of his body, Al-Alousi’s lungs were smaller than normal and his organs were more bunched together, which made surgeons in London hesitate to operate on his prostate, Christianson said.

“He’s always struggling for breath. His lungs can’t take in enough oxygen,” Christianson said.

One of the British doctors, who previously had worked at UCLA, finally recommended the urology department at the university’s medical center.

International Relations Manager Vivian Beene said she believes international patients put in the time, distance and money to come to UCLA because of its reputation in the medical world.

According to the 2007 U.S. News & World Report, the UCLA Medical Center is the third best hospital in the country. The urology department is ranked fourth.

“Our faculty are known world wide. … A lot of our doctors are seeing patients that no one else will see,” Beene said.

The international relations department reviews a patient’s medical records and puts together a treatment plan and cost estimate.

This is Al-Alousi’s seventh visit to the medical center. It was also his sixth surgery, and doctors hope it will be the most permanently successful.

“Here in this hospital, there’s really fantastic doctors, fantastic care. I never forget what done for me here,” he said.

A dead end in Baghdad

In the Baghdad hospital, Al-Alousi would only see death.

He spent much of his childhood in and out of hospitals, where he said people would go merely to die.

“I sleep here in the bed, the man behind me dying, and the doctor would just stand and watch him finish the death,” Al-Alousi said.

His accident would not only complicate his health and surgeries in the future but also leave him handicapped in what he called a harsh Iraqi society.

At the hospitals, the local doctors told him he was having panic attacks. He has since learned the breathing problems he experienced were due to a lack of oxygen in a constrained lung.

He would stay years within the walls of the hospitals but receive little treatment or be misdiagnosed.

“Hospital in Arabic countries are the same. Only rich people have chance for treatment,” Al-Alousi said.

But the hospital was sometimes better than the outside world.

He remembers people throwing stones at him and ridiculing him for his condition. Teachers called him “hunchback.” He feared walking in the streets.

Two or three times he tried to commit suicide but survived.

Because of his experiences, Al-Alousi said he does not consider himself an Iraqi, though he was born in the country and lived there for nearly 30 years.

“I not feel like Iraq is my country. Where you find your happiness and your friends ““ that is your home,” Al-Alousi said.

Guiding visions

For four years in the 1960s, he was kept in an Iraqi prison, on what Al-Alousi maintains were false charges of espionage.

Contained in a small room, the prisoners would be punished and whipped. Al-Alousi said that in the prison there was no future, only death.

“I could not breathe nothing. I cannot walk. I must do everything by the small room,” he said. “It’s not human; you are an animal.”

But one night he found inspiration for his escape from Iraq.

He had a dream in which the Virgin Mary led him out of the country to a church in a place he did not recognize.

To Al-Alousi, the dream meant he had to leave Iraq.

He was eventually acquitted of the charges against him, and in 1974 Al-Alousi used funds leftover from his deceased father’s will to go to Bulgaria.

It was there that he saw what he believes was the church in his dream.

“I see some big, big church, and I’ve seen the church before. I’ve seen this place before. Where? I don’t remember. But Virgin Maria took me there,” Al-Alousi said.

He later moved to Berlin and London, rebuilding his life in societies where his handicap was no longer an impediment.

Al-Alousi built a career as an astrologer, circulating a multilingual magazine called Al-Ballora, which translates to The Crystal Ball, starting a television program and offering his predictions to political leaders.

One of the leaders was the Sultan of Oman, who offered to finance all of Al-Alousi’s medical treatments when he learned of his condition.

As for Al-Alousi’s astrological sign?

“I’m an Aquarius; that means we are friends,” he said contentedly, a post-surgery celebratory glass of champagne in hand.

A new light

Five days a week, Al-Alousi exercises at the hospital.

After his surgery in April, he has been exercising as part of a pulmonary rehabilitation plan to strengthen his lung capacity.

Christianson said Al-Alousi plans to stay in the city until the end of August to ensure his condition stabilizes and his lungs become stronger.

But he seems to have found a new light on life.

Before he came in April, his legs were swelled, hindering his mobility, and he could hardly breathe.

Today he can stand, though he still needs assistance. And he can breathe, though at times he must rely on an oxygen machine.

“I’m really disabled man, but … I drive car, I traveled all the world. And I do the best, more than another man can do,” Al-Alousi said. “Destiny cannot suffocate me from the life.”