Dr. Thayer Ahmed (Palestinian-American Doctor, Chicago)
Appearances
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
By the time I left, I'd seen 13 children shot in the head total. Or at least that's what I recorded in my journal. I probably saw more, but I try to stick to what I actually documented.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
He's a Palestinian-American in Chicago named Thayer Ahmed. And we were just sitting next to each other talking before our panel started. And I said, you know, I couldn't believe how many kids I saw shot in the head. I just went through my journal recently, and it was 13. And he said, oh, yeah, I know, me too. You know, almost every day I saw a kid shot in the head. And I was like, oh, okay.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
So I started asking other people who had been over there, physicians, nurses, midwives, nurse practitioners.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
Almost everybody had the exact same experience. Almost universally, they said the same thing, which I really was surprised by.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
I thought that any sensible Biden administration would take that New York Times article as a major opportunity to feign ignorance about what had been going on in Gaza and to say, oh, my God, we can't believe American doctors saw this. And if this is true, then we're going to have to seriously reevaluate the arms that we send to Israel.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
You know, when people look at me, they assume I'm Palestinian or something, but I'm not. I lived in Haifa. That was from 2004 to 5. And I worked with, like, an Arab-Jewish cooperative that doesn't exist anymore. And during that time, I toured around in the West Bank. I was never able to go to Gaza, but toured around in the West Bank a lot.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
The operating room, the ICU. The nurse that was showing us around didn't really speak English very well. And she just pointed at these two kids and just pointed at her head and said, shot, shot. There were four kids in the hospital with gunshot wounds to the head. I just thought that that was unbelievable. And I just assumed that she was just wrong.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
I didn't think she was lying, but she was just incorrect. That probably was a shrapnel injury or something like that. But then I looked at these kids and they didn't have any other evidence of an explosive injury. And then we pulled up their CT scans and sure enough, it did look like they had been shot in the head.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
And then we went on and found two more kids also shot in the head in the other ICUs.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
Yeah. For me, what struck me about it was just the fact that it had happened. I work in a pretty rough part of the country, so I do see children who get shot in the head.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
But to see four kids with gunshot wounds to the head already admitted to the hospital when I get there, it certainly struck me as being very unusual.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
Overnight, we had another mass casualty event. EMS told us a building with a large number of people in it was bombed. And then two children arrived dead. The one I saw was 12 months old and the other was reportedly two years old. Next bullet. I took care of a seven-year-old girl with a blast injury pneumothorax to the right lung and a bad contusion to the left lung. Next bullet.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
I took care of a three-year-old child who had a massive aspiration after a head injury. Next bullet, I took care of a 20-year-old woman with a left hemonymer thorax and depressed open skull fracture. Next bullet, I took care of her sister. She had almost identical injuries. Next bullet, finally, I took care of a 25-year-old man with a frontal skull fracture and small associated subdural hematoma.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
That's like an 18-hour day. No, that was, all of that probably happened in one hour. That's one hour? That probably took about an hour or an hour and a half, yeah.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
And what I wrote down is that I was going through the ICU and I found an eight-year-old girl shot in the head overnight. Her pupils are fixed and dilated. It's a transcranial gunshot wound, definitely non-survivable. This is an eight-year-old girl with a bullet wound that went through her head. Yeah, the bullet didn't stop. And then, let's see, the next day.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
So the next day, the eight-year-old girl had died and in the same bed is a 14-year-old boy shot in the right chest and the head. The next day, I said, I went through the ICU afterwards. The 14-year-old boy turns out to be 12 when his family arrived. So then, let's see, two days later, he's been replaced by a 13-year-old boy shot in the head. I wrote, he'll also die.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
So then on that same day, I wrote, I took care of a two-year-old girl who was brought to the ED after being shot in the head. She arrived with bilateral fixed and dilated pupils, also a non-survivable brain injury. We then had a mass casualty event a few minutes later.