“Everyone who hears me, everyone who has a heart – do something good for my son, so that he will know his mother, so that he will have a mother at home,” said Eli, the husband of Rachel, who was transferred from her Jerusalem home to the Petah Tikvah hospital last Thursday. At the time, she was 31 weeks pregnant with their sixth child. The baby was delivered via cesarean on Friday. He was born at only 199 grams and is being treated at Schneider Children’s Medical Center.
“The feelings are not simple,” Eli said during a press briefing Sunday. “We have not had easy hours. I have five children at home.”
He explained how his wife had contracted coronavirus and only days later it became clear that she was not doing well. He called for medical help and a doctor from Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem consulted with the couple. The doctor told them that “we should not play with her life.”
So, the family left for Beilinson. At the time, Rachel only required the assistance of a mobile oxygen tank.
But that night, they took an X-ray of her lungs and the doctors determined her situation was worse than they thought, and recommended intubating Rachel.
“She is 33-years-old, a healthy woman with no pre-existing conditions,” Eli said. “Her only pre-existing condition is that she was pregnant.”
Eli ran to the hospital to meet his wife before they put her to sleep.
“Life can be destroyed in a moment,” Eli said over tears, asking the public to be more patient, to love each other more, do good deeds and say Psalms in his wife’s honor.
“We know that coronavirus is a very serious disease and we never know in advance how it will develop in a person’s body,” said Beilinson’s Dr. Ilya Kagan, who serves in the intensive care unit in which Rachel is being treated. “We cannot say the chances [of recovery] today will be the same chances tomorrow. Each day is new and the treatments are very complicated.”
Another doctor, Prof. Arnon Wiznitzer, an obstetrician and gynecologist at the hospital, said that the current wave of coronavirus has been much more difficult than previous waves and that many more young people have sought treatment at the facility.
“We have dealt with around 150 pregnant women from March until now,” the professor said. “This is the most difficult one until now.”