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Baby’s medical plight leaves family in tight space

bella English

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 12, 2012|By Bella English

At 15 months, Mohammed Alfroury is confined to bed in his familys Weymouth… (Al Alfroury )

No baby should be hooked up to a ventilator and a feeding tube, have a tracheotomy on his throat, and be scarcely able to move or talk. Mohammed is 15 months old, and instead of toddling and babbling, he is confined to a hospital bed in his family’s cramped Weymouth apartment.

Mohammed was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a fatal disease that attacks the muscles and nerves. How he got it - and how he got here - is really his father’s story.

His dad, Al Alfroury, is an American citizen who moved to Boston from Iraq nearly 20 years ago, and has since then worked, paid taxes, and voted. With his mother, six sisters, and two brothers in Iraq, Alfroury made frequent trips back and forth. On one of them, he married his sweetheart. He and his wife have a 4-year-old daughter, who is, thankfully, healthy. For years, Alfroury struggled with immigration and Homeland Security officials to bring his wife and children here.

“For every document they requested, it took me six months to get it. I’d send it, and they wouldn’t accept it,’’ says Alfroury, who is 40.

He was repeatedly denied, with questions about why he was going to Iraq so often. The answer, he says, is simple: to see his family. “I wouldn’t have gone if they had let my family come here,’’ he says, adding that his son and daughter are American citizens. With the help of the late Senator Edward Kennedy’s office, former US representative William Delahunt, and other Massachusetts politicians, he made some headway.

To fetch his ill son, who was in Iraq with inadequate medical care - many of the hospitals have little equipment and electricity - Alfroury had to twice take the sick baby to the American Embassy in Baghdad to get a saliva swab for a DNA test, send it to the United States, and wait weeks until there was proof of paternity.

Last April, he finally got permission to bring Mohammed here for medical treatment. In July, his wife, daughter, and disabled mother followed.

Alfroury, who lived in Marshfield and worked as a barber, spent thousands of dollars on the lengthy process. He didn’t have the money to pay for his family’s air tickets, so the Jonathan Rizzo Memorial Foundation in Kingston provided them.

The family of five is living in a two-bedroom apartment. One bedroom is filled with the baby’s medical equipment, and the other is shared by the couple, their daughter, and his elderly mother. None speak English except Alfroury.

As relieved as he is to have his family here, Alfroury worries, mostly about the baby, who can no longer speak. “He had a beautiful voice,’’ he says, leaning over so that the two are nose to nose.