To look at 5-month-old Zainab Al-Hussein, you'd never know she's sick. She's a beautiful girl with big brown eyes and a quick smile.
What's not as obvious is that she has a broken heart. "She has a hole in her heart," says Dr. Kenneth Fox, a pediatric cardiac surgeon.
"She doesn't have enough blood going to her lungs, and because of that, she's blue. If you look at her she's just isn't quite as pink as the rest of us and she's actually at risk for spells where she has a little spasm and actually doesn't get enough blood flow to the lungs, and can get her very very blue and that can be life threatening."
Fox will perform the surgery Tuesday at Dell Children's Medical Center for free, as part of the work done by the non-profit Austin-based group HeartGift.
HeartGift works with young people from mostly undeveloped countries, and provides a dozen children a year a free trip to Austin to undergo surgery.
The patients must be under 14 years old, and have a heart condition that can be treated in a single trip. HeartGift has just opened a San Antonio office, and is looking to open branches soon in Houston and New Orleans. Zainab and her mother, Eman Suliman, made the 2 1/2-day trip to Austin last week to get Zainab ready for the surgery.
The trip was difficult, but Suliman says she had to make the trip to give her daughter a chance at a long, healthy life. "It's a dream," she says through a translator.
The translator, Maya Hinedi of Austin, is fluent in Arabic and is hosting the family while they're in Austin.
"She says it's a dream that she was able to come here and have this operation with the best staff and I woudl say technology," Hinedi says. "She says that in our religion, which is Islam, they tell us that if you pray and fast you'll go to heaven. But she thinks HeartGiftis going straight to heaven."
Zainab's breathing is loud and labored, a constant witness to her struggle just to get her blood flowing. Difficulty breathing is a consequence of the Tetralogy of Fallot condition with which she was born.
"The repair we're going to do is fix the hole in the heart and open up the artery going out to the lungs so that she can get more blood flow through her lungs and hopefully be very close to normal," Fox says.
The doctor says the difficult and hours long, but if all goes well, should provide Zainab with a healthy heart for the first time in her life.
Mom Eman says she hopes her daughter will grow up to be a heart surgeon, just like the man she hopes will save her daughter's life next week.
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