Grim life inside, outside hospital
The Detroit doctor gauged that 20,000 Palestinians were living in and around the hospital, surrounded by piles of garbage, while others were in hallways with patients’ beds stacked against each other. There were barely enough rooms for patients, who resorted to walling themselves off by hanging sheets or blankets from the drop ceiling for privacy.
“When you’re in there, you don’t realize it’s a hospital, it looks like you’re in a refugee camp. I mean it is absolutely packed with the amount of people that are there. Like at nighttime, people need a place to sleep, so all of the sheets end up on the floor … if you leave the hospital at night, you have to step over people in the lobby in order to be able to leave,” Fahs said. “Nothing we saw in COVID is close to how overrun these hospital systems are. You’re not just dealing with patients, you’re dealing with their families as well because now no one has a home to go to.”
Electricity frequently cut out and hospital generators would kick in. Locals would drink water out of the faucet, and Fahs would see families line up at the bathroom to shower themselves and their children with bidet hoses since they have no other access to running water.
“We didn’t shower. My wife packed me some wet wipes, so every day, I would wipe myself down,” Fahs said of the seven days he was there. “I must’ve gotten used to my own smell.”
Discharging patients was a problem. Many did not have a stable or clean living situation, and some returned to the hospital with complications.
“When you wipe out an entire city, the patients no longer have a support structure to work with. Now you have an overwhelming majority of the population that’s either immediately debilitated from suffering direct injuries, or they’re debilitated now from the secondary consequences of not having a home or their place of business being destroyed,” Fahs said.
One patient needed both legs amputated due to a crush injury. Doctors hoped that was all he needed, Fahs said, but the man didn’t have access to a liv-*