In December, in the third month of the war, Nour was attending a birth when she learned that her brother had been brought in, seriously injured by an Israeli bombardment.
“I almost broke down because I hadn’t seen my family for months and I was afraid they would hide the news of his death,” she recalls.
“I ran around the hospital screaming until I reached him. He had serious injuries all over his body. I was crying uncontrollably.”
But his brother was alive and eventually recovered. He had been injured by the bombing of the neighboring house, which had badly damaged the house in which they had taken refuge.
“Like all families, mine – my parents and nine siblings – were forced to move from one place to another during the war,” Nour said.
Throughout her journey, she worked hard, wanting to be there for mothers in labor, many of whom are brought to the hospital alone, crying and desperate because they have lost loved ones.
“Women cry on the delivery bed and tell us that they have lost their child, their husband or their family. This deeply affects the birthing process,” Nour explains.
“Psychological well-being is essential for the mother who is giving birth. We try to offer her support. We hold her or talk to her, try to comfort her and reassure her.
“But there were so many cases that this was not always possible, especially in the first months.”
Nour recalls a woman who went into labor the day her husband was killed. She cried bitterly throughout the birth as she prepared to welcome a new life into a world where her baby’s father had just been killed.
“It was an incredibly difficult situation, and we were at a loss for words to comfort her,” Nour recalled, adding that the woman was shaking uncontrollably throughout the process, unable to control her emotions.
She had a baby boy, whom she named after her husband, and left the hospital wondering how she would support him.
A nurse rushed in, interrupting Nour, who was holding a newborn who was struggling to breathe. Nour rushed to help, making sure the baby was stable and connected to oxygen.
Once the situation was under control, she returned, although she got up from time to time to check on the baby.
Perhaps even more heartbreaking were deliveries where the mother had been injured in a bombing, sometimes just pulled from the rubble, Nour said.
“When the injury is at the back of the head, the delivery becomes extremely complex,” Nour recalls. “We have a hard time finding a position for her to give birth safely.”
“These situations… were not in my training or in the books we studied,” Nour reflected.