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Stranger in a Strange Land
- Oct 17, 2011
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Inside a Gaza hospital: A Los Angeles doctor’s story
Mohamad Abdelfattah ... was at the end of a two-week trip volunteering in one of the few hospitals that has remained open in the besieged city, days on end trying to save lives as Israeli airstrikes pummeled neighborhoods.[Then the Rafah crossing was closed and his two week stay got extended.]
Abdelfattah’s wife, Donya Salah, waited at home in Orange County with her phone close at hand.
After arriving at the European Hospital with a team of 19 volunteers from the Palestinian American Medical Association, Abdelfattah was stunned to see so many people — by his estimate, thousands — sheltering inside the facility and on its grounds.
Trained as a pulmonary and ICU physician, Abdelfattah had been at MLK [hospital in Los Angeles] for three years. The memory of the pandemic and the second wave of Covid infections was still fresh in his mind: drowning in the 12-hour shifts, multiple codes at once, cardiac arrests. He thought he would be prepared for a war zone.
But the intensive care unit here was in a state of “complete chaos.”
“Patient monitors were constantly ringing,” he said. “There was no infection control, no hand soap, no contact gowns. Flies were everywhere, landing on wounds. The staff was exhausted and burned out.”
Abdelfattah was not used to pediatric cases; he hadn’t anticipated seeing so many children.
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