In late 2024, shortly before a cease-fire Cursed violence in Gaza, I was on a month -old medical mission to Al -Aqsa Hospital, in the center of Gaza, my oldest emergency experience for local doctors. Most of these doctors were displaced, and their homes were destroyed, but they continued to appear in the emergency department as volunteers. Almost every day, we responded to a fat accident-an event that overwhelms hospital resources. In several days, we have seen more than one.
On December 8, an air strike was killed on a tent in the Nuserat camp for refugees, at least five people, including religion and two children. Another air strike settled a residential building in the Bureij refugee camp, killing at least nine. Burig was two miles away, and we can hear the explosion from inside the hospital. We rushed to the ambulance Gulf, and we prepared to receive patients.
The first was a seven -year -old boy. Aside from the treatment and exit wounds behind its knee, it looked safe. Initially, I thought it was lucky. Then EMTS arrived to tamper with his little sister Sabah, who was about six months old. Their parents were just killed in the same attack.
After morning, I ran to the critical care room. Wrapped in a shiny thermal blanket, it might look quiet if not for the tubes in its nose and mouth. I can see hidden bruises behind its eyelids. There were huge wounds on her cheeks and fractures in her skull.
The breathing tube was secured in the morning in a strange way, to avoid its injuries. Medical employees have also inserted a nasal tube, which usually follows the intubation, to prevent vomiting. This concerns me. Maybe it has face fracturesI thought. The tube can unintentionally reach its brain. Certainly, when I looked closely, I was able to see the issue of the brain coming out of the tube. Sston suddenly disagreed. The breathing tube came out to it.
I tried to direct the tube again by placing my finger in a small morning mouth. For my amazement, I started to absorb it. It was weak. Divide survival instincts are buried within the central nervous system to the point that they are not affected even due to the destroyed injuries. I was hoping that anything stayed out of her fragile brain, she was morning dreaming – from her mother’s embrace, or her father, who grieved the story of sleep. An ambulance was called to transport it to a CT scanner. The scanner for the cut cut cut cut off the cut cut in Al -Qaqa, and it cannot be replaced by the siege, so it should be transferred to another hospital.
And while I stood beside Sabah, my finger in her mouth, and weighing what I was suffering from, was overwhelmed by me for the first time. I did not save her, but she did not die. We were frozen somewhere between them.
When I closed my eyes, I felt tears falling. But this was not sad – I have long made peace with the tragedy of the loss of patients and even children. Instead, you are angry at the injustice around me. I wanted the world to feel what I felt. I wanted to shout and drive my grip on the walls. But I could not. Whatever I was carrying inside, the people around me were carrying for at least fourteen months. I finally torn myself from a morning bed and I went up the stairs to my country.
The next morning, in the patient’s room that was converted into a sleeping area, she fought vigilance. I did not want to accept that the next day had arrived, because that means that yesterday had happened. I didn’t want to remember that, as Zarin doctors, we could not leave the hospital: we could be here, we care for the wounded, or the injured there. He was a friend of mine, an emergency doctor who was also from the United States, standing over my rank. We were the only American doctors in the hospital that day. “I saw her tomography, she said.
Sabah was a hopeless diagnosis of it: severe edema. Her brain swelling until it was pressed against her skull. She was in the intensive care unit, but her case was now stretched.
The working day passed. An incident, then another. I tried not to think about in the morning. Night night, followed by more MCIS, each wave of patients has concluded the few resources we have. The strikes described as dismantling Hamas have killed doctors, bombing ambulances, and destroyed Human infrastructure; Only three of the hospital in Gaza for thirty -six hospitals are now operating. We knew that even after the last bomb fell, children would continue to die – not shrapnel but from sepsis, drought and wounds that would not heal.
Collective sweating incidents have a way to convert patients into numbers-is not the harsh way that news stories are calculated but slow and more intimate. Sometimes I thought about a wooden defect I had when I was bigger. Each patient was imagined as a grain coated with bright colors that gradually slip through a steel rod. Sometimes, a pill caught your attention and became more than a pill. I have seen its details – the wood pill, a slice of paint. But the beads did not stop. The count went.
On December 10, I went to the intensive care unit to visit Sabah. It will be suspended between life and death until the intensive care unit doctor ultimately had the courage to assign it to the artificial respirator on zero. She imagined her brother in the tents extension outside the hospital. He had gone out of the care of those who came to him that night – a neighbor, or perhaps a cousin. Many parents have died that we could not wait for parents. If the child is able to name the person standing in front of them, he is allowed to leave.
On my way to the unit, a smiling man stopped me. He put his hands on his chest, in the shape of a heart, and looked at his nurse. “Your patient was in ER two nights,” said the nurse.
Suddenly, I remembered. I moved away from a long time enough for his finger, and his diagnosis with the Tamoor plug – his heart was drowning mainly in the blood – and begins to treat it. Download seven fingers. “He went to a heart attack for seven minutes before his heart started again,” the nurse translated. Now he was sitting in front of me, his pink and smiling. Just after you spoke to him, I started an unbearable start to look like. I went to a morning bed and said goodbye.
In January, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire. The streets are full ZagutaA trilogy sound makes some Arab women on happy occasions. People sang, danced, and cried tears of comfort and joy. The first phase of the ceasefire, intended as a temporary restoration, witnessed the release of twenty -five Israeli hostages and about a hundred Palestinian prisoners. The Israeli forces withdrew from the populated areas, allowing some of the displaced to return to the remaining neighborhoods. However, only one crossing on the border was open to humanitarian assistance. According to the permitted rate, the United Nations was estimated, it takes three hundred and fifty years to rebuild Gaza.
With the next stage of the ceasefire approaching, the agreement began to appear increasingly fragile. In the face of international condemnation – but American support – Israel has restricted aid, reduced electricity, and prevented medical supplies, with the aim of pressuring Hamas in reviewing the terms of the agreement and issuing additional hostages immediately. In Gaza, I saw what the collapse in the ceasefire means. More children are born like Sabah under a sky full of loud military aircraft; More will die when the bombs fell on their homes. But I also saw what could happen when the patient was given a chance.
Doctors working in the emergency department in Al -Aqsa were often graduates of the medical school or general practitioners. In the previous year, they dealt with shock patients more than their American counterparts in a decade. But they often worked without supplies, electricity, or books to learn from them, and many senior doctors who could have provided guidance had killed, or displaced. With no one to teach them, doctors often direct their resources away from patients suffering from serious-sections that have been strengthened when patients died in the end. In different circumstances, with appropriate resources and support, some of them may have survived.
Four days after Sabah arrived in the emergency department, there was another air strike in Nuseirat, and another child was placed on a front bed. She was four years old. I used to open bandages around her head, and put her wounds, when an emergency population said, “A hopeless issue.” The nurses agreed around me. They all said of certainty that I initially asked my strangeness. Someone noticed that the issue of the brain was leaking from the wounding of her head, and this is true. However, for me, this meant an open fracture – which would leave space for the two backgrounds to cancel the pressure instead of swelling until it reaches the bone. I told them: “We have to try.”
As an emergency doctor, I try to analyze facts, evaluate risks, calculate possibilities, and create decision -making. The training develops your sense of possible and impossible. I felt this girl had a chance. I am Frankshncht together a mysterious manual manual unit of the child-Ombo bag-and connected it to the supply of oxygen. I was grateful to find the inner uterine tube for children.
Emergency resident, who reached her second year in the hospital without almost any supervision, wanted to learn how to stimulate the patient. This is an essential skill that every emergency doctor should know. Unless we take control of the girl’s airway, her tongue, blood, or vomiting can cut oxygen from her lungs. I have made sure that the girl has one of the devices that earn a few hospital impulses; We prevented the Israeli siege from a new request. After the oxygen level reached one hundred percent, the nurse handed over a paralyzed drug. Now the girl’s breathing was in our hands. “ready?” I asked.
“Ready, ready,” said the resident. She started looking for a girl’s vocal cords with a laparoscopy, but she could not find her. The first attempt of the resident was lost – the tube was in the esophagus. (It is not allowed to enter “medical supplies that can have” double use “, which means that it can be theoretically reused in a tiny way, so we were working without a metal style that would usually guide the breathing tube). I can also see its design.
After giving the girl some oxygen, try the resident again. The paralyzed girl was wearing; I was able to see her began to revolve around our tools. We have made it in time to prevent its dinner – the pasta Karin – from going to its lungs.
