Struggling to save lives

"It's amazing," Gretel said about the international melange of peoples working together at Wolfson Medical Center. The children, parents and caretakers are housed together at the SACH Children's Home dormitories, near the medical center.

Unlike the Mideast strife outside, the adversary at this bustling medical oasis is illness.

But, Gretel knew, the hardest part of her metamorphosis with Qian still lay ahead.

"The day when he went into surgery, I was really nervous," Gretel admitted about the moment to wheel Qian into the operating room for the complex procedure.

In a six-hour operation called an atrial switch, SACH lead surgeon Dr. Lior Sasson and his team carefully sliced open Qian's chest cavity and repaired his tiny heart.

Qian suffered from dextrocardia - a condition where the heart sits reversed in the chest cavity - and had a hole between two lobes which allowed pulmonary and ventricular blood to mix, according to Dr. Ilan Cohen, deputy chief of the pediatric intensive care unit at Wolfson.

Gretel, who had rarely left Qian's bedside since their arrival, said the most emotional moment in her whole visit came as the baby slowly awoke and groggily opened his dark brown eyes after the delicate procedure.

"Sleep, sleep, my baby, mother's arms will be a safe harbor," Gretel - as any Beijing mother might - softly sang a traditional Chinese lullaby to Qian to calm him, as he struggled back to consciousness when the anesthetic wore off.

"When I touched him, and sang for him, he began shedding tears, " she said, "because he knew that I was coming for him."

Will you adopt him

"I didn't get along with him for a long time," Gretel says of her first days with Qian in Beijing. She had envisioned her role as a volunteer only responsible for feeding and keeping Qian safe, she said, adding that she did not have an emotional attachment to the child then.

"But here, we'd be sleeping in the same bed all the time, and every morning when he woke up and if he saw me, he would smile," she said of the bonding process anyone in her role might undergo.

Gretel considered how she has changed, as she has grown into her guardian role.

"At the moment he went into surgery, I started to shed tears, and I realized: 'I'm a mom now,' and I think it's awesome, it's really awesome to be a mom for him," she said.

But Gretel knows her role will end when they return to China after Qian's recovery, and Qian will return to the orphanage.

She says she knows, now that he is healed, a family may be more likely to adopt him.

"Everyone is asking me, 'will you adopt him?'," she says, and laughs as tears begin to well in her eyes.

"If I can find a husband, I will adopt him. I will definitely keep this memory in my heart for my whole life. It's wonderful," she says.

(Xinhua News Agency May 6, 2010)