To the unknown child: I tried to save your young life in a Gaza hospital. Now your face haunts me | Seema Jilani

While the ceasefire news is on my way, my memory is mocking me. Your face slides to focus from a mental abyss, where you buried it.

I came to the emergency room at Al -Aqsa Hospital Gaza During the early morning hours. Your fat cheeks are browned due to the cold of the night, and heavy eyelashes fall into tears in the ponds under your eyes. I save you this time. I do my job. Fragments of glass caused by an explosion caused by an Israeli air strike that tears your arms and your two small legs. I clean wounds and sew you without even minimal pain. Suitable torture for both of us. “Follow up within five days to remove stitches after the hacked injury caused by a secondary explosion,” I write on your chart.

Days pass. You will return to my emergency room, this time without mobility, blue. Another Israeli air strike in Deir Al -Balah leaves fragments implanted in your brain, causing blood to flow to your skull. Your thick brown hair, covered with frozen blood, makes it difficult to examine your scalp. My fingers feel the pulse, first your inner thigh, then your neck, but the meat is very charred so that its place cannot be determined.

My blue gloves hover over your flexible mouth. I insert the breathing tube between the inverted V from your vocal cords, just as I trained. The chest was asked to be filmed with X -ray, and carbon dioxide was detected with a change of yellow color. The yellow color means “Yes, the tube was properly introduced into the trachea, not the esophagus.”

I turn on the recovery code completely through the book. I watch you swing between the world of the biology and the angels. There is no pulse yet. I ask my colleague to try if my recovery is the reason.

When your soul turned next to me, was the devil there too, listed my sins? What are the questions of the painting in which I made a mistake, the time I went to watch a movie with friends rather than studying more, and the test I had to return. All of this led to this moment. I was supposed to be able to tell your mother that she is yes, you will cheer when you graduate, your tears will dry after your first sorrow, dance at your wedding, and hold your hand during labor. Your mother might have wished that he was a more intelligent request on that night.

It has missed the time of the heroes. I must stop breaking your ribs by pressures on my chest. It is the usual preparation now: wipe the blood from your purple neck, and tightly dismantle with a soft hospital cloth that smells of infertility. Wip the iodine from the place where the nurses are placed feverish intravenous solutions. Cover any deformities as much as I can not even have your mother to remember you this way for the rest of her life. Drafting this anniversary is the only kind work that I can present to it now. Mix your forehead with my fingers, and remove the harsh hospital tapes.

I try again and again to close your eyes. Modern medicine has made machines that allow me to control the number of seconds that the patient breathes and brings out, which allows me to measure the amount of urine with milliliters per kilogram per hour, but so far no one has discovered a way to make the eyes closes at the moment that parents see their children for the last time.

TV programs end with eternal children’s sleep and doctors exit from the doors of the emergency room resented themselves. In real life, when the bodies bear the cruelty of war, we remain and clean after death. We talk to parents and carry them when their legs slip from under them.

Your mother deserved her right to cry tonight, under the lights of the Florent Hospital. Even with the harmony of the industrial respiratory system with the breathing of the neighboring patient, it has gained the right to the howl. She has gained the right to bury her face in the hospital fabric, thirsty for the smell of her baby’s hair.

Death time: 3.48 am. Stop hours. Skip the call devices. Shut up alert machines around us. Tell the ambulances to remain silent. Relaxed from the terrified children who are rushing on donkeys or between the arms of the neighbors. Stop drones flying over your heads. Calm nearby bombings. Allow me with this stillness, please. Take out the hijab pinch, bring the white lilies and let the mourners come. If there is nothing else, allow me to sit with your ascension, even for a moment, only before I rush to the next heart.

I shake my curved head and drown in my shame. I am wrong, open. Your death is also self -death. The disappearance of the false belief that we doctors believe is that we are able to save people. Your mother collapses in my arms. I can’t bear weight. I tell her that there is nothing else to do. Her world explodes. I hugged her hard, as I do with my daughter.

I have seen your face before. I saw this on medical evacuation trips when you tried to prolong your life until a moment I did not hide with your mother. I saw this in the water off the coast of Libya, on a rescue boat for refugees, trembling with low body temperature, without the presence of a parent to calm you. I saw this in the operating rooms in Iraq, when a mothers painted your feet nails in preparation for a heart surgery. She said to me: “In the event of her death at the operating table, she will at least know how to feel beauty.”

Some faces I will never see, perhaps the treatment was expensive. Perhaps you were unable to escape the risky flight to reach – walking under the shadows of drones that hover over the slopes of Afghanistan. Perhaps you cannot risk immigration checkpoints along the border between Texas and Mexico. You may have been turned into a floating body in the Mediterranean.

In your eyes, I see everything exposed: sins committed in the name of the wars that we pretend to be ignorant, or justify, or rewrite them. Your silhouette dates the pain that can only be caused by colonial brutality. I carry you wherever you go. But maybe it’s time to bury you now, instead of recovering at 3.48 am several times. I return to work. The next child needs me. The family is angry at waiting.

• Sima Al -Jilani, a pediatrician. It worked in Afghanistan, Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Sudan, Lebanon, Egypt and the Balkan region. Her radio documentary, Israel and Palestine: The human cost of the occupation, was nominated for the Pepodi Award