How We Keep Caring While Walking Through Our Pain
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Author Dedication. To my dear brother Omar Ziara, a bright doctor, entrepreneur, and community advocate who was killed in an Israeli bombing in November 2023.
May your soul rest in peace and may your memory remain alive in our hearts. May your unborn child grow up to become the wonderful man that you were. Forever loved by all.
Palestinian-American poet, Suheir Hammad, writes:
Occupation means that every day you die, and the world watches in silence. As if your death was nothing, as if you were a stone falling in the earth, water falling over water.
And if you face all of this death and indifference and keep your humanity, and your love and your dignity and you refuse to surrender to their terror, then you know something of the courage that is Palestine.
I am a doctor from the Gaza Strip in Palestine. I live through acute war and protracted occupation. I work under missiles and through scant resources. I experience risks and dangers and face abominable choices made from nightmares. I know heartbreaking death.
As doctors here, we fear, suffer, cry, and grieve alongside our patients and their families. This is my story of how we continue to care.
Summer 2014 A Fifty-Two-Day War: How To Stay And How To Keep Them Safe
The huge bombardment strikes close to the hospital, scattering glass and rubble. It brings an abrupt end to my rare, quiet pause for coffee. Are the babies hit? We sprint to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, our full attention only on those infants, hastily checking every crib. My thoughts are frenzied. What if the next missile strikes us? Will I be able to rescue them? Will I have time to carry their tiny bodies outside through wreckage and fire? How will I choose who to save, and who to leave behind? Could I choose? Will I even be able to think lucidly, act logically for those babies if the fire consumes us? We stay.
Somewhere, a house razed to the ground, a mother and her children dead. This time, our babies are safe.
Summer 2014 A Fifty-Two-Day War: How To Cast Off Danger And How To Find Consolation
A missile shatters our neighbour’s roof. I am about to leave home for my evening shift. I check on my shaking mum; she is okay, not hurt at least. I ring the senior doctor. I am sorry. I am coming. I will be a little late. Two further missiles hit, wiping out the next-door building completely. No, do not send an ambulance for me. It is too dangerous. I will come [End Page 153] alone. Trembling through the dust and darkness, I leave on foot to reach those babies. I must compose myself. We are needed there to bring calm, to keep caring.
And we gamble our lives to seek distraction and comfort for ourselves. We find solace through unbearable pain in our caring.
Winter, Spring, Autumn, Summer, Any Day: How To Question Purpose And How To Feel Helpless
It is an ordinary night shift in ‘quiet’ times. Tonight, all the beds are occupied. All the ventilators are taken, forcing life into small, sick faces. At dawn, the phone call comes. A new baby struggling to breathe is on his way. I call around. No more beds to take him here or anywhere. No more ventilators—here or anywhere. Bring him here. We will care for him.
He is in a very bad way. He needs immediate life-saving care. We take turns manually ventilating him, working to the hissing rhythm of the Ambu Bag1—inflating, deflating, inflating. Our arms ache. We keep pumping the bag. Do not stop. The moment when the morning shift arrives is our moment of salvage. We can go home. We have made it through the night without medicines, machines, disposables, or enough manpower, our arms throbbing. We have kept him alive.
But he is so fragile, the system is fragile, we are fragile. Dare I even ask—is it worth it? Is it worth a baby surviving the...
