You get the best kind of doctor in a place like Gaza.
And i’ll tell you about one.
Two years in. Operating in a hospital with no power half the time, by torchlight when it goes, on tables that were never meant for this many people. They have learned to keep their hands steady through things most surgeons will never see in a career. They’ve stopped flinching. They’ve had to.
That’s who was there in the room on Tuesday.
To cut off a 10 year old girl’s arm without anesthesia.
And when it was over, he walked outside and couldn’t stop crying.
That’s how I know how bad it was. It got through a man who had nothing left to get through.
She’s ten years old.
Her arm couldn’t be saved. That decision happens fast there. Waiting means infection, infection means death, so somebody looks at a child’s arm and decides in minutes that it has to come off.
And there was no anaesthetic.
I need to say what that actually means, because I don’t think most of us have ever had to think about it.
It means she was awake.
Not drowsy. Not sedated. Awake, eyes open, in a room full of strangers, while her arm was being sawed off.
She was conscious for every second. She heard it happen. She felt all of it, from the first moment to the last, with nothing in her body to soften any part of it.
And somebody had to hold her down.
Think about who that was. Someone’s hands were on that girl’s shoulders. Someone leaned their whole body weight on a ten-year-old and kept her still, probably telling her she was nearly there, that she was being so brave. That person was in the room too. That person went home afterwards.
Anaesthesia is the only difference between surgery and torture. It is the single difference. It isn’t a luxury or an extra. It is the whole reason an operating room isn’t a torture chamber.
And it wasn’t there.
Not because it doesn’t exist. It exists by the pallet-load, not far from where she was lying. It wasn’t in that room because it was not allowed in her land.
Somebody decided that. A person signed something, or refused to, and because of it a ten-year-old girl was held down and operated on fully conscious.
She will never unknow that. She was ten, and she found out what the world is capable of while it was being done to her.
And her surgeon will carry it as well. He had to be the one. He had to put his hands on a screaming child and keep going, because stopping would have killed her.
He saved her life by doing the worst thing that has ever been done to her.
Then he went outside and wept, because what else is there.
And this is not one unlucky girl. This is Gaza’s hospitals, every day, for two years. Amputations without anaesthetic. Wounds dressed without painkillers. Children who walk in trusting adults and come out never trusting one again.
I don’t want you to look away from this one.
Tell someone. At work, at dinner, wherever it costs you something. That a ten-year-old in Gaza had her arm amputated while she was awake, because the medicine that would have spared her was held at a border.
She had nobody in that room who could stop it. Not one person.
And somewhere tonight there is another girl on a table, her limbs being sawed off.
For the girl in that room,
Hafsa