Nonfiction | January 05, 2022
Terrorist Doc
Morris E. Hartstein
Terrorist Doc
Using a scalpel, I made incision across the length of the baseball-sized mass in the patient’s upper eyelid. Within seconds, like walking in a dense fog, I was struggling to identify any recognizable and normal anatomical structures. I worried we would cut right through some vital tissue without realizing it. As if the delicate, hours-long procedure to remove the baseball-sized mass over her eye wasn’t nerve-wracking enough. I was also stressed that as a result of my more or less smuggling this patient—a five-year-old Palestinian girl from Gaza—into my hospital in Israel for a risky surgery, I might be fired or arrested at any moment, for “aiding terrorists.”
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