Nine-year-old Katusha Selimaj gives her long brown hair a supermodel shake and throws back her head, showing off her pierced ears and her smile to the dozen adults hovering around. The picture of self-confidence, she is the only person in the room who looks comfortable sitting in those tiny red chairs, despite the klieg light twice her height staring her in the face.
Yes, she's very happy to be in Austin, she tells a TV reporter through an interpreter.
No, she's not scared of the open heart surgery she'll have today at Children's Hospital, 6,000 miles from her Albanian home.
Yes, she's been told before how brave she is.
Katusha works the audience like a veteran of media frenzies, flashing cameras and pointing microphones at one point letting her face fall into her hands in a fit of embarrassment and making it clear that the interviews are over. Even brave little girls get tired of answering all those questions, after all.
In reality, the only thing she's a veteran of is the turmoil and war that have torn her small Balkan country for much of her life. Until she
was 3 years old, Albania was a one-party state ruled by Communists. When she was 8, Albanians took to the streets to riot and loot after many lost their savings in investment plans that turned out to be frauds. Since she turned 9, thousands of people have fled to her hometown of Bajram Curri to escape the ethnic fighting just across the border in the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo.
And Katusha's own body hasn't been spared the upheaval of living in a poor, embattled nation. But thanks to an international charity, she was flown to Austin two weeks ago to have her heart problem checked. It was too difficult for doctors in Albania to repair.
Once she arrived, physicians from Children's Cardiology Associates and Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery in Austin -- who had donated their time and services -- determined that the problem was a less serious, more common congenital defect: a hole less than an inch in diameter between the left and right atria of her heart. The signs and symptoms are mild to nonexistent in children, but the hole can cause more serious damage to the heart and lungs later in life if it is not repaired.
"It just points out to me that they really have a lack of adequate facilities even to diagnose this kind of condition," said Lewis King, the heart surgeon who will operate on Katusha today.
King, who will use a small piece of tissue from Katusha's pericardial wall to patch the hole, called the surgery a low-risk operation lasting less than an hour. After a few days of recovery in Children's Hospital, Katusha will stay in Austin two more weeks.
Keith Carney, an Austinite who works for Dell Computer, brought Katusha here on behalf of Operation Angel, a British charity group for which he has traveled to the Balkans since August. She is one of 13 children who have come back with Carney for medical care in the United States.
Monday, with her mother, Sipresa, by her side, Katusha learned about her surgery and chose the flavor of anesthetic she'll receive.
Ask your doctor tomorrow if you can have bananas in your mask, she was told. Breathe into the mask, and you'll fall into that special medical sleep.
Mmm-hmm, she said, laughing and tossing back that hair.
Nine-year-old Katusha Selimaj gives her long brown hair a supermodel shake and throws back her head, showing off her pierced ears and her smile to the dozen adults hovering around. The picture of self-confidence, she is the only person in the room who looks comfortable sitting in those tiny red chairs, despite the klieg light twice her height staring her in the face.