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Rewriting my Story in a Hospital Room
Yesterday, I walked into a hospital for an exam I had been dreading for 18 months. On paper, it was a simple medical test. But for me, it carried the weight of a lifetime.
Forty-five years ago in Germany, I had surgery for reflux. The experience left me marked—not just physically, but emotionally. What scarred me most wasn’t the procedure itself but the pain, the way I was yelled at, and the sense of abandonment I felt. For decades, I carried that memory in my body, avoiding any medical procedure that might bring it rushing back.
So yesterday wasn’t about just another test. It was about facing the ghosts of the past.
This time, though, I wasn’t in Germany. I was in Israel. Medicine here is advanced, and I was being given a test I had never done before. New country, new doctors, new language, new surroundings. And with that, the possibility of a new story.
The nurses were kind. The process was gentle. My friend sat with me. And for the first time in decades, the experience of being in a hospital didn’t retraumatize me. Instead, it opened a door I thought was forever closed: the door to healing.
The Lesson
What happened in that hospital room wasn’t only about a medical exam. It was about proving to myself that trauma does not have to dictate the future. That even long-held fears and beliefs can be reworked. That new experiences—in a new place, with new people—can overwrite old ones.
And this lesson isn’t just mine. It isn’t just Israel’s. It belongs to all of us. Because right now, across this region and across the world, we are living through not only conflict but a human crisis. Innocent people are dying everywhere—in Israel, in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan, in Yemen, and in places we rarely even hear about.
Parents are burying children. Children are growing up without parents. And each side is told it is necessary for survival, protection, or revenge.
I want to be clear: I condemn terrorism in all its forms. Nothing justifies the horrors of abduction, rape, murder, or massacre. And at the very same time, I cannot close my eyes to the suffering of innocent people caught in the crossfire. A mother in Gaza mourns her child in the same way a mother in Israel does. A father in Ukraine or Yemen feels the same hollowing grief as one here. Trauma does not stop at borders, and grief does not recognize religion or nationality.
So where does that leave us?
I don’t pretend to have an easy answer. Some days I wonder if it’s even possible to ask for what I am asking, when the wounds are so raw and the grief so immense. But what choice do we have except to keep coming back to the heart?
True healing does not mean forgetting or denying pain. It means loosening trauma’s grip so that compassion can take its place. And compassion, if we allow it, belongs to everyone—regardless of race, creed, sex, environment, circumstance, or nationality. This is not a contest of whose trauma is worse, or more justified. When we look at it with compassion, all trauma is devastating.
If my hospital experience taught me anything, it is this: what feels final may not be final. Even when everything in us insists there is no way forward, sometimes there is.
Our stories are never finished. And maybe remembering that truth is the first step toward healing—not just for me, not just for Israel, not just for Gaza, but for all of us, everywhere.
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