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Metaphors and Medicine (Year I): Chapter 15

 “They’re arriving in 3 hours. Be ready to meet them and get their story,” the social worker told me.

They had waited for weeks to get permission to leave Gaza and come to be seen by the visiting surgeons. They finally got permission two days after the day of screening, but they were coming and that was all that mattered. Three hours later, I received a call declaring their arrival and went looking for a little boy and his mother outside of the OR. As I looked around, a little boy peeked our from behind a woman seated to my right, and smiled the biggest smile, his beautiful big eyes decorated with his long lashes.

“Are you from Gaza?” I asked the woman he was hiding behind. “Yes! " She said. "This is my son.”

I sat next to her, reached out my hand to hold his little one, and once again he smiled. Their story was a long one, one laced with medical troubles over his short life and restrictions designed by occupation. But they were here.

His surgery was the longest I had ever stood in let alone assisted in. When another member of the team took my place 8.5 hrs later, I went looking for his mother. She was terrified, overwhelmed, scared. I kept reassuring her she was doing amazing, how lucky he was to have someone like her who battled all the complications to bring him here.


On our last day, I went to visit him and her in their room, and found myself overwhelmed with tears. Here was a connection I didn’t expect to find, the little boy who peeked out to see me, his mother who was stronger than so many others I had met.


These stories redefine the limits, raising the bar for patience and strength. These kids softened my heart and made me emotional in a place where physicians are not encouraged to display too much emotion, where one must be resilient, resilient, resilient.


But when a humanistic connection happens, it changes you no matter what, and that is not something one can control, no matter what the “rules” are. You let it change you, you let yourself feel, you remember the boy waving, the child who blew bubbles at you, the little girl who cried with everyone in scrubs but reached for you.


You let yourself feel, you let them change you. 

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