After her cousin Stav was injured on October 7, Suzanne Patt Benvenisti visited him in the ICU at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem every day for weeks.
“I was actually injured twice. I did get hit with a little shrapnel from an RPG. Me and my friend got hit with a spray of bullets … In the hospital I started thinking, wow, you really could have died,” said Stav, who underwent nearly a dozen surgeries.
“Seeing him today in this completely, completely different physical and emotional mental state, it was amazing,” said Patt Benvenisti, head of the Hadassah Offices in Israel.
Michal Lipscheutz leaned on her 23 years of experience as a Hadassah nurse when she found out her son Yair had been severely injured in Gaza.
“I didn’t know what to expect. If his body is whole, maybe he lost a limb. I was wishing that his mind was OK. If his mind is OK, he can face challenges and overcome them,” she said.
“I couldn’t feel my arms or legs, I didn’t know where I was hurt. I just felt blood running down my neck. I woke up two and a half weeks later,” said Yair, who went on to undergo rehabilitation at Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus.
“I came here in a wheelchair and now, thanks to Hadassah, I’m back on my feet. I can walk and run,” Yair said.
Yael Weissman, a midwife at the Rady Mother and Child Center at Hadassah Mount Scopus, was working on October 7 when she found out her twin sister, Michal, was shot by terrorists while volunteering on an army base.
“When I saw her the first night, I just cried. She was a mess. She was half a person. She couldn’t move her hand,” Weissman said.
Michal underwent complicated surgeries at Hadassah Ein Kerem.
“And since then, I went to rehab,” Michal said. “Now I’m still doing rehab here in Hadassah Mount Scopus. And it works. My hand is getting back to life. Thank you, Hadassah.”
Hadassah surgeon Yonaton Demma goes back and forth from the battlefront in Gaza to Hadassah Ein Kerem. He was serving in Khan Younis when he found out his younger brother Shlomo had been injured. “Most of the injury was head, neck, left and right arm and left and right leg,” Demma said.
With the help of rehabilitation staff at Hadassah Mount Scopus, “I started to walk and run again,” Shlomo said. “Now, I’m almost independent.”
“As a doctor and as a big brother, I couldn't be happier,” Demma said.
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