Incompatible with life
Members of the medical team in the trauma unit at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem have some things
to say to the politicians in these times of terror and electioneering.
Ari Shavit
Haaretz, 6 December 2002
(selection)
Uzi Yizhar, heart-chest surgeon
What were they going to serve for dinner? First course: fillet of sliced tomatoes stuffed with goat cheese; second course: soup of meat stock; third course: entrecote steak done on coals and served with arugula leaves; dessert: tart tatine. It would all happen on an immaculate white tablecloth, with fine china brought especially from France. And be accompanied by a superb red wine, proceeding in the elegant, aesthetic, minimalist style of the friends in Mevasseret Tzion, a Jerusalem suburb, where Uzi Yizhar was invited for the Friday evening meal.
But at 7:30 P.M., the emergency room called: There had been a shooting incident in Hebron, and a quarter of an hour later, when he entered the trauma unit at Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem in Jerusalem, it already looked like a battlefield. All these young soldiers with deep wounds. And the blood, a huge amount of blood. It only takes 20 or 30 ccs of blood on the face to create an unpleasant sight, Uzi Yizhar says, and here people had lost half a liter, in some cases a whole liter.
In the first stage, all the evacuated wounded are Nameless. Nameless 1, Nameless 2, Nameless 3. There is something right about that, Yizhar says, because you have to move immediately to a medical setup and a professional line and not think about the context in which it's happening. The human story, the person, the tragic circumstances - you can read about that tomorrow in the newspaper. And of all the many terrorist attacks in Jerusalem in the past two years, Yizhar recalls only one case in which they were aware of the human dimension in the emergency ward. There was a seriously wounded boy from the Beit Yisrael neighborhood who kept shouting that he wanted his mother and father. But we in the trauma room already knew that his parents had been killed, Yizhar says. We knew that the attack had erased the mother and father of the shouting boy.
The young soldier from Hebron who was placed under his responsibility was very badly hurt: shattered leg, gunshot wound in the throat, massive bleeding. But what had to be done was to ignore what catches the eye and stick to the procedures of ATLA - After Trauma Life Support. First of all make sure the air passages are open, then ensure the respiratory system, then estimate the volume of blood, then a neurological check, then a scan for wounds. Because what's most important in trauma situations is to maintain the existential order of priorities. Intubation, hook-up to respirator, transfusions, catheter. And chest x-ray, spinal x-ray. Then immediately, within a quarter of an hour, to rush the bleeding young soldier to the operating theater; to try to stop the massive bleeding in the operation.
Yizhar chooses his words meticulously. He is also very meticulous about his body, his food and his dress. He is a handsome man of 44, Jerusalem-born. Restrained, introverted, cautious. A gifted chest surgeon. It's only afterward that it starts to seep in, he says. After the wounded person is already in surgery and after you have examined the others to see whether they have chest-heart damage. When you see the emergency ward slowly empty out, the wounded being scattered to the wards, the orderlies washing the blood away, only then do you stop to ask yourself, wait a minute, where am I? What happened here? And do I continue with my plans for the evening? Do I go to the dinner? And you say yes. I'll go. Because what are you going to do? Lock yourself in a safe? Sit in the house and cry? So you shower and get back into the elegant black clothes you had been wearing and get into your car and drive through the dark along the road that climbs from Ein Karem to Mevasseret Tzion. And suddenly it hits you. All the chaos hits you, the madness we are living.
At the immaculate table you say nothing, of course. Because you don't think you need that therapy. You don't need to ventilate your feelings like that. And it wouldn't be fair to impose on others what you have just gone through. The blood that covered your clothes, the sights, the smell of burnt flesh. The feeling of a battlefield in the trauma unit. A battlefield. On the way to dinner. After all, everyone in Israel is living this chaos today. The only thing that makes you different is that you touched it physically. You saw this all-encompassing chaos rampaging within the collapsing body systems of one young soldier.
He is leftist in his opinions - Meretz and left of Meretz. Uzi Yizhar has felt nothing of the rightward drift that everyone is talking about. As far as he is concerned, we can give back all the territories, give the Palestinians a state and give them half of Jerusalem, too. After all, it's obvious that there is a given geographic territory here that has to be divided in two. So let them divide it between the two parties, period. He finds this whole thing about the Land of Israel and religion and a historical tie strange and bizarre. They are terms in a language he doesn't understand, like Chinese.
Uzi Yizhar does not accept the argument that there is no one to talk to. Because if there is no one to talk to, we have to talk with ourselves. And if peace with the Palestinian people is a myth, then we have to draw the line ourselves, without peace. The tanks shouldn't be in Jenin or Bethlehem, they should be on the Green Line. After all, this whole technique of going into Ramallah and then leaving Ramallah hasn't proved itself. He himself doesn't understand how it is that after two full years like this people haven't yet taken to the streets. How it is that people aren't crying out that this has become a routine way of life that cannot be lived. A routine way of life that must not be lived.
We have this term in medicine, Yizhar says: It's incompatible with life. And the situation that has developed here is exactly that: incompatible with life. It's not a war like the Six-Day War, which has a beginning and an end and some sort of goal. Which has a defined setup. Instead, it's some sort of insane situation in which hell intervenes in the line of normal life time and again. If it's once, all right. It's a one-time disaster. If it's twice it's still tolerable. But when it becomes a kind of ongoing reality in which these events erupt into the routine of life over and over, it becomes nightmarish. It becomes something that hones the feeling that these victims are dying in vain. That these people are dying unnecessary deaths.
And then, when you're sitting at home and reading and listening to jazz and within 10 minutes you find yourself in hell, you say that it makes no sense. It can't be. And when you go for dinner afterward and eat the entrecote that's prepared on coals you say this is not a reality that people can live with. The life we are living here now is a life that is incompatible with life.
