It was my childhood dream to study medicine. I wanted to be a doctor to help people. I never imagined that I would study medicine not in a university, but in a hospital; Not textbooks, but raw experience.
After finishing my BA in English last year, I decided to register for the medical faculty of Al-Azhar University. I started my studies at the end of June. With all the universities of Gaza destroyed, we, medical students, are forced to look at conferences on our mobile phones and read medical books in the light of the pocket lamps of our mobile phones.
Part of our training consists in receiving conferences from older medicine students that the genocidal war has forced to practice prematurely.
My first such conference was from a fifth medical year student called Dr. Khaled at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir El-Balah.
Al-Aqsa is nothing like a normal hospital. There are no spacious white rooms or privacy for patients. The corridor is the room, the patients are on beds or the floor, and their groans resonate throughout the building.
Due to overcrowding, we must take our lectures in a caravan in the hospital courtyard.
“I will teach you what I have not learned from conferences,” started Dr. Khaled, “but from the days when medicine was (something) that you had to invent.”
He started with the bases: check the breathing, open the airways and carry out cardiopulmonary resuscitation (RCR). But soon, the lesson moved into something that no normal program would have: how to save a life with nothing.
Dr. Khaled told us about a recent case: a young man pulled under the rubble – broken legs, head bleeding. The standard protocol consists in immobilizing the neck with a stabilizer before moving the patient.
But there was no stabilizer. No splint. No nothing.
Dr. Khaled therefore did what no medical manual would teach: he sat on the ground, rocked the man’s head between his knees and held him perfectly immobile until the arrival of the equipment.
“That day,” he said, “I was not a student. I was the splint. I was the tool.”
While the supervisor was preparing the operating room, Dr. Khaled did not move, even when his muscles started to hurt, because that was all he could do to avoid other injuries.
This story was not the only one we heard from Dr. Khaled about improvised medical solutions.
There was one who was particularly painful to hear.
A woman at the start of the thirties was brought to the hospital with a deep pelvic injury. His flesh was torn. She needed urgent surgery. But first, the injury had to be sterilized.
There was no betadine. No alcohol. No clean tools. Only chlorine.
Yes, chlorine. The same chemical that burns the skin and stings the eyes.
She was unconscious. There was no alternative. They poured chlorine.
Dr. Khaled told us this story with a voice that was trembling with guilt.
“We used chlorine,” he said, without looking at ourselves. “Not because we didn’t know better. But because there was nothing else.”
We were shocked by what we heard, but maybe not surprised. Many of us had heard stories of desperate measures that doctors in Gaza had to take. Many of us had seen the heartbreaking video of Dr Hani Bseiso operating on our niece on a dining table.
Last year, Dr. Hani, an orthopedic surgeon of the Al-Shifa medical complex, found himself in an impossible situation when his 17-year-old niece, Ahed, was injured in an Israeli air strike. They were trapped in their building in Gaza City, unable to move because the Israeli army had besieged the region.
Ahed’s leg was mutilated beyond the repair and it was bleeding. Dr. Hani did not have much choice.
There was no anesthesia. No surgical instruments. Only a kitchen knife, a pot with a little water and a plastic bag.
Ahed was lying on the dining table, his pale face and half -closed eyes, while his uncle – his own eyes overflowing with tears – prepared to amputate his leg. The moment was captured in video.
“Look,” he shouted, the voice breaking, “I’m going to amputate his leg without anesthesia! Where is mercy? Where is humanity? ”
He worked quickly, his hands trembling but precise, his surgical training colliding with the raw horror of the moment.
This scene was repeated countless times through Gaza, because even young children had to go through amputations without anesthesia. And we, as a medical student, learn that this could be our reality; Whether we too, we must also operate on a parent or a child while looking at and hearing their unbearable pain.
But perhaps the most difficult lesson we learn is not to deal with-when injuries are beyond savings and resources must be spent for those who still have a chance of survival. In other countries, it is a theoretical ethical discussion. Here, this is a decision that we have to learn to make because we will soon have to do it ourselves.
Dr. Khaled said to us: “At the medical school, they teach you to save everyone. In Gaza, you learn that you cannot – and you have to live with that. ”
This is what a doctor in Gaza means today: bringing the inhuman weight to know that you cannot save everyone and continue; Develop a superhuman level of emotional endurance to absorb the loss after the loss without breaking and without losing your own humanity.
These people continue to treat and teach, even when they are exhausted, even when they are hungry.
One day, halfway through a traumatic conference, our instructor, Dr. Ahmad, stopped in the middle of the sentence, looked at the table and sat down. He whispered: “I just need a minute. My sugar is low. “
We all knew that he had not eaten since the day before. War exhausts not only medicine – it consumes the very bodies and minds of those who try to cure others. And we, students, learn in real time that medicine here does not only concern knowledge and skills. It’s about surviving long enough to use them.
Being a doctor in Gaza means reinventing medicine every day with what is at your disposal, treatment without tools, resuscitation without equipment and bandage with your own body.
It is not only a resource crisis. It is a moral test.
And in this test, wounds pass deeply – through the flesh, by dignity, by hope itself.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
