The helicopter comes in low over the pad, and before it’s fully down the doors are open and they’re running. Two soldiers. One has lost both legs — the tourniquets are already on, someone in the field did that right, and it’s the only reason he’s alive to be wheeled in screaming. The other has obvious shrapnel injuries. He’s conscious, talking, but in pain. He’s put on the overflow side of the trauma bay. Nothing about those first moments tells you which of the two is closer to dying. 

We immediately perform a trauma ultrasound and the picture changes completely. The soldier who still has both legs has internal bleeding we can’t see, blood pressure dropping in ways that don’t match his face. He’s still lucid enough to know something is wrong. Lucid enough, in the last clear minute he has, to ask not about himself but about the soldier on the next stretcher. He asks with a weakening voice:

Despite the heroic team effort, he doesn’t survive long after his multiple emergency surgeries. The soldier who lost both legs survives.

I don’t have a way to make that make sense. I only have the fact of it: a man’s last coherent thought, as his own life was slipping away, belonged to someone else.

Medicine can usually tell you where the bleeding is from, why the pressure is falling, why an injury is not survivable. It can explain why one body survives while another doesn’t. Usually. This, it cannot explain.

I live in a world that has a name for things like that, even if medicine doesn’t. I grew up in a home and in a yeshiva where faith wasn’t one part of life among others—it was the frame everything else hung on. Emunah wasn’t a subject we studied so much as the air we breathed. Then I entered classrooms, hospitals, and emergency departments where that certainty wasn’t the default. I didn’t leave that world behind; I spent years learning how to carry it into rooms that didn’t share its assumptions. I still strive to be that yeshiva guy. For a long time, I was simply the only one in the room who saw the world that way. 

I practiced medicine on the East Coast first, in emergency rooms where a yarmulke was a fact about me that occasionally needed a sentence of explanation, and faith was something you kept in a separate pocket from the job. The medicine there was excellent. It was also, in a way I couldn’t have named at the time, simple in a particular way — nobody in that trauma bay was going to ask me to stand in for anything but the doctor.

Israel, when we finally made aliyah, was supposed to be more of the same, just closer to home. Mostly, that’s true. But I didn’t expect medicine........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)