I've had the misfortune of having to make two trips to the emergency room in the past 6 months. Lucky for me, Jerusalem's best teaching hospital is a stone's throw from our house. The first time I visited it, I went alone on the weekend for some difficult-to-diagnose abdominal ailment that I convinced myself was kidney stones. The second visit was last night when my son was rough housing with some friends and put a nice gash in his forehead. Interestingly enough, despite the fact that my visits were 6 months apart, different days of the week and different times of the day, the staff and medical personnel were almost completely the same. This time, however, entering with a child with an Arab name left me with a slightly different experience over the first visit.
I have decided not to research or fill my brain with what I consider useless (to me) details about how Israel's social medicine system works. I have the good fortune of being able to maintain this ignorance thanks to the excellent insurance coverage offered by my employee. I just need to plop down a credit card, make my payment, and am efficiently reimbursed for almost all expenses. However, seemingly reflective of the Israeli distrust of foreigners, the check-in procedures at Hadassah Hospital's Emergency room require special papers on which I sign multiple times confirming my willingness to pay. Then I hand over my credit card, and they dig up from some dark corner one of those hand credit card swipe machines that requires a small piece of duplicating paper to copy the numbers off the card. I laugh whenever I see this machine in Israel, and last night, it was such a foreign and rarely used object for the hospital staff, that as I stood there waiting for them to get my card unstuck from the contraption, I watched the makeshift bandage I had put on my son's head soak through with blood. They asked for passports, and hoping that I would not need to reveal my son's name, I gave them mine. But I was not the patient and they insisted on seeing his passport. Sure enough, when they opened it and saw his name I got the question exactly as I was expecting, "You don't have another Passport? You don't have an Israeli ID or any other (Ha'weeah, the Israeli-issued Palestinian ID) ID?" Why I would hide something like that in a place that offers socialized medicine makes little sense to me, after all they did have my credit card and signature on about 10 forms at that point. Aahh, but the fun was just starting!
When we finally were allowed entry into the crowded triage room, which, also typical of Israeli waiting areas, had little organized rhyme or reason to it, I stood for about 10 minutes until a nurse spotted my son's head bandage and took our papers. I told her immediately in clear English that I did not speak Hebrew. She looked at the papers, saw my son's name and began to speak to me in Arabic. I then told her, "English is what we speak." She gave an odd glance back to the papers, and proceeded to take my son's blood pressure. I thought at this point that all possible confusion about our identity must have been fully transparent by this point. But as we sat down next to an elderly Arab woman, she leaned over and asked me in Arabic, "Is this your son or daughter?"
The room was filled with a mix of Jewish and Arab patients, sitting side by side with those dizzy blank looks of people waiting numbly in emergency rooms. There were several settlers with guns as well and I found this extremely disturbing. While the site of civilian settlers with guns has become almost common place to me now, for some reason, seeing them inside an ER room made me incredibly angry. But I had my son's health to think about, so even though a strong statement was on the tip of my tongue, I withheld it and turned my attention back to the scared creature with his head in my lap.
After a very brief wait which would be any US emergency room to complete and utter shame, we were escorted by a Jewish doctor to a bed. He was walking in front of me continuing on and on in Hebrew as I tried to interrupt him. When we finally arrived at the bed I said to him, "I'm sorry doctor, but I only speak English." He replied hastily in American English, "Oh good! Even better!" He gave the positive prognosis within a few seconds, then told us the nurse would be right in to glue up my son's cut, "He is very nice and won't hurt you a bit!" My son took one look at me and said as loud as he possibly could, "A nurse whose a HE?!?" I would save my lecture about gender equality for another evening. A few minutes later, a group of people returned with the original doctor. A female doctor who first rambled onto me in Hebrew until I cut her off in English. She looked at the chart, looked at my son and said, "Omar?" And then she turned back to me and rambled off in Arabic. Simultaneously, the nurse, an Arab, began a conversation with my son. I think my son was way too traumatized to even put up a fight about speaking Arabic, and obliged the nurse the conversation. But at one point, I really couldn't handle trying to follow the after-care instructions in Arabic. I turned to begging them in English to speak English as that was our mother tongue.
My cover was completely blown at this point – why pretend to be a "real" American any longer? Why pretend not to have some deep connection to the Arab world? Why pretend that I am or am not Palestinian. If settlers and Arabs can sit side by side in an emergency room in Jerusalem, than I certainly can feel perfectly comfortable….being….myself. And I felt a sense of peace rush over me.
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