From the S&S archives:
Viet girl praying for a Yule gift of life

SAIGON — It might be the best Christmas ever for Mai. Or it might be her last.

She was born 22 years ago in An Loc Village, in the rugged hills near the Cambodian frontier north of Saigon. It was never a generous land, and new war has added its curse to the poverty of Mai's village. North Vietnamese hiding across the border have dueled savagely with the Americans and South Vietnamese for supremacy in the hills for months.

"Mai" means flower in Vietnamese, and Nguyen Thi Hoa (her real name) has the soft. gentle Eurasian beauty of the nickname her French-Vietnamese parents gave her.

It was 20 Christmases ago when she fell sick with the rheumatic fever that left her with heart disease. "Congestive heart failure," "basal pulmonary vale" and "severe mitral valvular disease" is what the doctors call it. What it means is that Mai probably will not be alive next Christmas, unless she gets her "Christmas gift" — now.

The attacks started in September, when Mai was working as a waitress in a Cholon restaurant to send her younger brother and sister through school. She learned her sister-in-law, five months pregnant and with a 2-year-old baby, had been wounded in a Communist mortar attack. Mai's older brother, Nguyen Van Nha, is an army lieutenant, and had no way to care for his wife.

Mai took the first bus she could for home. She stayed a week. taking over her brother's house and watching over her sister-in-law. When she got back to Saigon, exhausted, she was stricken with coughing spells and began spitting blood.

Friends took her to the Saigon Adventist Hospital, where American Dr. Jose Holm took X-rays and an electro-cardiogram. He discovered a huge clot of rheumatic scar tissue on the side of Mai's heart was blocking a major valve, and her heart had swollen to twice its normal size, squeezing her lungs.

Holm wanted to hospitalize Mai, but the girl refused. Site was existing now only on her dwindling savings. She had already lost her job.

Holm knew the girl could live only another year at most without immediate surgery. lie wrote to an MD friend at the University of California's Berkeley Medical Center, and asked then to accept Mai for open-heart surgery as a charity case. Dr. Paul Kelly, chief of the school's cardiac surgery department, agreed to help Mai.

Meanwhile, Mai received word her brother had been shot in the arm in a battle.

Kelly wrote that a hospital bed was reserved for her arrival on Dec. 9, and Msgr. James R. Flynn, head of the Catholic Charities of San Francisco, wrote that he had found two Vietnamese families living on the West Coast who would take Mai into their homes while she recuperated after surgery. She would be well again by Christmas.

With a smile and a new lease on life, Mai applied for her visa. Then she found every Christmas has a Scrooge — passport laws in Vietnam require a fee of $200 for leaving the country. Mai had no money.

She found out she could go free under a special medical provision if extensive medical examinations determined that the surgery could not be done in Vietnam. It can, but the only Vietnamese surgeon here skilled enough to do it will have no openings on his crowded schedule for a year. By then, it may be too late.

Dec. 9 has come and gone, but a board of doctors will not meet until the day after Christmas to decide Mai's fate.

More hurdles arose. The U.S. Air Force says it can fly Mai to San Francisco, but only on orders of the U.S. Embassy. Mai was told by the embassy they know nothing about such requirements. As soon as one red-tape barrier falls, another springs up between Mai and the operation that will save her life.

So she lives, a week before Christmas, 1967, on hope and massive doses of medicine — praying that this year an absent-minded Santa Claus will remember a little flower trying to live in the desert of a pitiless war.