Hadassah staffers: Operating in the face of terror

By SAM SOKOL
Prof. Ahmed Eid (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Prof. Ahmed Eid
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
‘What are you doing?!” Chava Gardner looked up to see an angry fellow staffer at Hadassah University Medical Center confronting her as she wiped blood off the face of a wounded terrorist just wheeled into her emergency room.
“Cleaning his face,” the emergency room nurse brusquely replied.
“He’s a terrorist!” her co-worker stormed.
“He’s a patient,” she replied, turning back to her work.
Weeks of constant terror attacks have strained nerves in Israel, with rising anger and resentment spreading throughout the population. The confrontation that Gardner, a veteran ER nurse and immigrant from Alaska, recently faced is indicative of the general mood among Israelis.
A majority of Jews polled stated that they believed that terrorists should be killed on the spot, even if they no longer posed a threat.
Though mobs have beaten several terrorists after they were subdued, such altercations are almost nonexistent within the medical community, according to doctors and nurses who spoke with In Jerusalem.
The medical community’s belief that everybody is deserving of treatment has proven controversial among many here, as evidenced by the public backlash against the Magen David Adom ambulance service when its chief publicly stated that it would triage patients at terror attacks, regardless of their status as perpetrators or victims. Those who were most severely hurt would be the first ones helped, he said, engendering widespread criticism.
But it is just that ability to practice medicine divorced from any outside considerations that is a primary value for medical practitioners in Israel, whether Arab or Jew, according to several who spoke with In Jerusalem.
“The nice thing is that once you’re in the ER, you are like in a cocoon, where the politics are set aside and you have no conflicts with co-workers. That’s my experience,” said Gardner.
While politics doesn’t affect the day-today work there, it does come up at times.
She recalled that during the last campaign in Gaza, working alongside Jews and Arabs, “All is fine, you laugh at the same things – and then you go home and see things on Facebook that make you wonder. People ‘like’ certain things that are against you, but they never come up at work. You know these things are there, but you don’t talk about them,” she said.
Her comments are reminiscent of those of United Hatzalah chief operations officer Dov Maisel, who recently told The Jerusalem Post that during last year’s Operation Protective Edge, volunteers both Arab and Jewish, were posting on Facebook and letting off steam in inflammatory ways.
“Discussions were sparked on the WhatsApp groups of the volunteers...
[with] both sides conducting sometimes a very tense discussion, but at the end of the day they managed to dismantle these mines,” he recalled.
One first responder, who asked that his name and organizational affiliation not be mentioned, recently revealed that he had a very difficult time dealing with terrorists, and that while he did his job to the best of his ability, he wished he didn’t have to.
For some, the job definitely has its stresses.
Asked about how she copes with treating terrorists, Gardner had a different take, similar to that of other emergency- room personnel who spoke with In Jerusalem. She said she was able to create a mental barrier between her job in the hospital and what happened in the streets.
“It’s my patient, and I don’t want to know what happened outside the trauma unit or anything about his beliefs. I know he is lying there and needs my help,” she asserted.
She was unsure, however, if the fact that she did not think about such things, even at home, was a sign of repression or just a sign that she will not allow what she does to affect her or what she is doing.
“I think I use the very impersonal way of dealing with things,” she continued.
There are no ties with patients. And even those unconnected to terrorism, such as those guilty of domestic violence or rape, receive the best of treatment, “but you don’t connect to them,” she said.
Gardner said that one of her relatives who works in another ward had a patient who was in a room next to a terrorist.
“It’s not an easy thing, and there are a lot of different emotions and feelings involved,” she said.
There is a lot of criticism of how the Israeli medical community practices, and Gardner frequently argues back, especially in classes that she is taking for her master’s degree.
“Most of Israeli society is critical,” she said. “‘You work in Hadassah, you take care of terrorists? What kind of thing is that?’ You hear that everywhere.”
Dr. Elchanan Fried and Prof. Ahmed Eid, head of the intensive care unit at Hadassah Ein Kerem and head of surgery at Hadassah at Mount Scopus, respectively, have become minor celebrities due to the terror wave, with a recent Washington Post article noting how the pair have worked together to save lives on both sides.
Eid has worked to save terror victims, including a 13-year-old Jewish child stabbed by two Palestinian teens on October 12, an attack that was caught on video, shocking the country. Fried, meanwhile, has worked to save the lives of terrorists.
“Of course, the times are a bit difficult now, and there is tension all the time,” but the “minute a patient comes in, we do our thing and we don’t think too much about it,” Fried said, describing an oasis of calm in the midst of strife.
“When a patient comes in, we don’t always know who the patient is. And even if we know, it doesn’t really matter,” he continued. “It’s always the same: A patient is a patient is a patient, and we don’t think about exactly what he did or if he was the victim or offender. Afterwards, dealing with someone who actually killed other people, when we think about that, it might sting a little bit. But again, it’s not our job to be the judge and make different decisions because the patient is a terrorist.”
The job of the doctor, he said, is to save lives, and then the justice system can take over.
Having to treat terrorists isn’t much of a concern due to how long he has been working in the medical field, he continued.
“We are professionals… we leave our political opinions when we come into the hospital,” he said, apologizing that he didn’t have anything exciting or grand to say about the situation.
“I will say that the major issue right now is that there are fewer patients coming in altogether, Jews and Arabs,” he said. “I think people are afraid to go out of their homes. Aside from that, it’s business as usual.”
Everything in Eid’s department is functioning normally, he said, agreeing with Fried that dealing with terror is “not new for us.”
Nearly half the staff is composed of Arabs, he continued, calling the hospital a “micro-environment” of coexistence that people coming from the outside don’t understand.
“Relations are very good. We are not involved politically in anything going on outside,” he said.
Asked if there were any issues such as those described by Gardner, he said that he was not aware of any and that he would not tolerate anybody, Jew or Arab, bringing such conflicts into his department.
Although, he admitted, “It could happen.”
He did say, however, that the sight of young people being wheeled in definitely has an emotional impact.
“It affects you when you see a patient lying on the table dead and you ask yourself, ‘Why did he do this?’ You look at his body, he is young, you feel very bad about it, never mind the reasons. Why should this person at this young age lose his life? For what reason?” he asked.
“It strengthens the feeling that what is happening now is wrong, and someone has to have the courage to stand up and say ‘Enough is enough!’ and to find a new way forward,” he said. “It is up to the political leaders to change such things.”
While he wouldn’t engage in a political discussion, he did say that he believed that political leaders on both sides of the conflict should go to the hospital and see how well Arabs and Jews get along there.
“We would be glad to assist [political leaders] in acquiring such skills,” he said.
Ilanit Tal, chief nurse of the surgical ward, likewise said that political considerations do not enter the hospital. If she saw people being given different treatment based on race, she would definitely intervene, although she hasn’t seen any such cases, she said.
“I wouldn’t agree to that,” she asserted.