Giving birth in one of the world's busiest delivery rooms
“It’s a boy, Professor!” I screamed with joy as I barged in his office after a simple ultrasound when a nurse accidentally dropped this bomb. I was six months pregnant with my fifth child.
By HADASSAH CHENPROF. ARNON SAMUELOFF: No matter what, life goes on here.(photo credit: SHAARE ZEDEK MEDICAL CENTER)
I was conscious but very scared. I was not hurt and not in pain, thank God.Pregnant and entering my ninth month I was in a car accident with my husband back in 2005. By some miracle, we walked away from it with just a big scare for me and a broken wrist for him. The car was gone.I was kept in a hospital overnight. As I opened my eyes the morning after, I saw the friendly face of a man with a white apron and a large smile.“How are you, dear? You and the baby are both okay and you can go home today.”“How do you know I speak English?” I answered, surprised.“Well, you have some Vogue magazines on your table. I don’t think an Israeli would be reading that.”THE SAMUELOFF family today. (Courtesy)THAT WAS the first time I met Prof. Arnon Samueloff. He introduced himself and told us he does high-risk pregnancies and in my case, after going through an accident I was treated as a high-risk patient.By the time I left the hospital, I had fallen in love. Well, maybe it wasn’t exactly love, but I was definitely in awe of this man. We said goodbye and he wished me an easy delivery.Elkah was born three weeks later at Hadassah Ein Kerem.
“Where is Sameuloff?” I screamed at my husband.“Sweetie, he works in Shaare Zedek. You chose Hadassah Hospital for your delivery, remember?”Fair enough.Two years later I was sitting in a simple office in Shaare Zedek with nausea, feeling faint.“Yes, Mrs. Chen, you are pregnant and I am very happy to see you are doing fine and you don’t need me as a doctor because you are not a high-risk patient.”“Oh no, Prof. Samueloff. Now that I have found you again I am not letting you go,” I answered, politely but firmly.I finally found in Israel a doctor who is funny, good-looking and so polite – I feel like I am back in Italy!That was where the comparison to an Italian doctor ended, though, for in Italy a professor like Samueloff would be sitting in a fancy-schmancy office with three gorgeous secretaries typing away in an office next to him, ready to obey and fulfill any wish of his. The professor would be sporting a fake tan, gold Rolex, Hermes tie, and some botox in his cheeks if he were in Milan.The Professor, as I started calling him, moved like a young man, full of energy, always calm, nice to everyone – staff, nurses, cleaners, patients – no matter who they might be, Jewish, religious, Arabic, Italian or Chinese.The moment you become a patient of the Professor you are his. You become his concern, your worries become his, you can write to him anytime, he will answer you, call you and check on you.When I was ready for delivery I wanted only him in the delivery room and he answered me like a teacher.“You don’t need me and I don’t want you to spend money on me. If I will be at the hospital I will be there with you. If not, we have an amazing staff of incredible nurses who deliver better than doctors here in Shaare Zedek. Trust me, you are a big strong healthy woman; if anything happens they will call me and I will come right away. Keep your money, you are young and building a family.”In Italy, I would be writing a check for the doctor’s new Rolex...I literally walked out of the delivery room with my baby Mussyah; by the time the Professor came to see me I was wandering around the ward looking for an espresso machine.“I told you you were going to be okay.”He smiled while he checked my blood pressure. That was the thing with the Professor – he makes you feel safe. He tells you what you are feeling even though he will never know that feeling. He calms you when you are nervous; his presence gives you strength.AT MY third delivery, the Professor walked in and smiled at my new baby as we joked how she really does not look like a child of mine, for she had black thick hair and almond eyes.That was my Navi. Sadly, she passed away two years later from neuroblastoma.At that point, doctors became something completely different in my mind. Everything had changed. I had lost touch with the Professor for I was basically living in Hadassah Ein Kerem. Gynecology was not my thing anymore; it was oncology on my mind. Children’s oncology, the fifth floor in the children’s building. That was our new home.I never told the Professor what we were going through; it was not his problem anymore. I thought he had enough on his mind with complicated pregnancies and whatever happens afterward to the kids he delivers is the parents’ problem.But life is funny and destiny wanted us to meet again. The surgeon who operated on and removed my baby daughter’s tumor died from a heart attack at the young age of 62 just a few months after he performed the surgery. He was a special man called Dr. Eitan Gross. At his funeral, my husband and I left our daughter’s side at the hospital to be there for the burial, still in shock and sad about losing such an incredible man.As I lifted my eyes right after the ceremony at Har Hamenuchot cemetery, I saw the Professor standing in front of me.“What are you doing here?” he asked. “You knew Dr. Gross?”I poured out my heart and told him about Navi and the ordeal we were going through.He listened. Really listened.WHEN WE next met a few months later I was waiting in front of his office. I sat there in silence. Navi had passed away a few months before.As the office door opened to let the patient out and the new one in, the Professor noticed me sitting and waiting. He walked out of the office and took me inside even though clearly it wasn’t my turn yet.No woman said a word.He looked at me.“How are you, my dear?”“I’m pregnant,” I answered in tears while smiling.“I can take care of that,” he smiled with his heart.Nine months later my Sara was born and I was screaming in shock at the Professor that it was a girl and not a boy as if it was his fault.He made sure there was always a nurse checking on me every hour when he wasn’t at the hospital and I wasn’t to be left alone. My emotional state was intense this time. He wanted to be sure I was ready to go home with another baby that was not Navi.We joked about how I am religious and he is not, how I am right-wing and he is not, but we never argued because once you become a patient in his eyes we are all the same. I felt like we knew each other so well, yet he remained a mystery to me. I watched him make his rounds when he came to check on us women who had just delivered, always in his green uniform, his strong fragrance and gorgeous smile.The truth is that I didn’t know anything about him. It was always about me when we met. He could have just come back from a trip around the world where he spoke to hundreds of students, yet we never knew.“It’s a boy, Professor!” I screamed with joy as I barged in his office after a simple ultrasound when a nurse accidentally dropped this bomb. I was six months pregnant with my fifth child.Chaim was born two years after Sara and the Professor was in America. I called him from the delivery room on Shabbat. I had gone into labor and was scared. He answered in shock that I was calling him on Shabbat only to realize I was having a baby. Even though it was early morning in America he guided me through as if he was right there with me. Finally, I calmed down.”“Are we done?” he said, smiling as we sat in his clinic one day. “No more children, please,” he whispered.“Professor, let’s talk about you now, it’s about time.”WITH HIS mother the nurse (SHAARE ZEDEK MEDICAL CENTER)FINALLY, THE day had come. I was to spend a full day next to the Professor, director of gynecology at one of the busiest delivery hospitals in the world, but not as a patient this time.As a writer.He let me in his private office, the walls covered with pictures of “his children.” I was so wrong when I had thought that once the baby is out it’s not his “thing” anymore. The AC is on and the office is freezing. Behind him I spy family pictures.“Finally,” I think to myself, “I see his wife and children.”“My father was a doctor, my mother a nurse,” he tells me. “I always knew I wanted to be a doctor. I grew up in Jerusalem and my wife’s family is 10 generations of Jerusalemites from the illustrious Salomon family. Our parents were friends and we met at a friend’s wedding, it was very much a call of destiny, I knew I was going to marry her a week after we met.”He scrolls pictures on his phone of his younger years.There he is in his army uniform in Sayeret Matkal. I’m drooling. He looks like Paul Newman. Another flip on the phone and there are his kids – three girls, and one boy.One is a gynecologist, one is a NICU registered nurse, the third is a special therapist and the boy is a law student.Not bad.“How many babies have you delivered, Professor, more or less?” I ask.He takes out a calculator and after a few seconds he smiles. “Probably around 12,000,” he answers.“You built this country, Professor! First you fought for its existence and then you helped it become populated!”“COME WITH me. We have a Cesarean now,” he tells me.I am given a full blue vest that covers me from the ankles almost to my cheeks. They put me in a cap, mask and gloves. I am so excited.We walk into the operating room. So weird to be standing there for once and not laying down. The Professor shows me the delicate task of washing up before surgery. He briskly brushes his hands and arms with a special brush and soap and still dripping with water, he makes his way into the surgery room. He is dressed in full operating gear, but his head cap is colored and has the word “sexy” on it.Funny.I am placed right in front of the patient’s tummy. The woman knows I am there but will not hear me or see me.The doctor is ready, the staff is ready. I am not sure I am ready.Just like an artist makes his first brush of paint on an empty board, so the Professor makes his sharp cut on the big tummy.How many times he has cut like that, yet from his eyes, it is as if it’s the first, he knows he is changing some parents’ life forever and bringing a new life into this world with all his love and care.I shiver, first layer, muscles, a second layer, I start seeing blood, third layer...By now the Professor takes his hands and literally opens up the rest of the stomach, delicately but strong, and suddenly a child emerges from the depths. He cuts the placenta and takes out the baby.A miracle.The baby starts crying; the Professor turns it toward the mother and shows her trophy. It’s a girl!I am crying.As the baby is taken away, the Professor now has to close all the layers of skin.Seven minutes, that is how long it takes for him to perform a Cesarean.As we leave the surgery room my head is spinning. On the way out we see the husband of the woman, a religious man with a book of Tehillim in his hands and peyot curled up on the side of his head.“It’s okay, you can stop praying now. Go and see your baby, Abba!” says the Professor to a very nervous new father.“DOES IT make you feel like God?” I ask as I sip a hot cup of coffee.“I’m just a messenger of God. I deliver what He has sent,” he replies with a grin.“Nonetheless, you are not religious at all,” I insist, hoping he will not slap me.“No,” he smiles. “There is God up there and there is me. It’s okay, I have my own relationship.”Yet many of his patients are from the most religious crowd. In Italy, a professor of this caliber would be visiting only superstars or queens.“I also have some VIP clients, don’t worry,” he tells me as if he read my mind. “You have to understand, Hadassah, that I work in one of the busiest hospitals in the world where we often don’t have enough space in our delivery rooms. Once I was asked to visit a big new hospital in Belgium, they were showing me the delivery rooms but there was no action – there was not one delivery happening that day! We can have up to 50 a day here! I travel around the world, I train, I teach in university and I lecture and there is something to learn from every country, but there is no other country like ours.”“When exactly does he have time to do all this?” I wonder, yet whenever I call him it feels like he was just sitting doing nothing waiting for my call.That’s the secret to his success. A man that has served in one of the top military units and become one of the top doctors in the country who delivers thousands of babies, teaches a whole new generation of future “professors” who emulate him and want to become like him and cares for each patient from any walk of life as if it’s the only patient he has.He is simple, straight, hardworking and loves with passion what he does. “WE HAVE another Cesarean,” he tells me. I’ve already had two coffees and three chocolate bars; the professor had not eaten yet.“Are you not hungry?” I ask, embarrassed.He wants to keep fit and when he works he doesn’t feel hungry. I know he loves to cycle around the world in his free time with his close group of friends with whom he can be simply himself, no big professor, no panicked pregnant lady and no stress. Just him, the bike and nature.As the interview comes to a close, I have “assisted” in three Cesareans. I am wiped out; the Professor looks fresh as a flower.He is 70 years old.I feel old.As we say goodbye, I watch him from afar. He still has a long day ahead and I am just thinking of taking a hot bath. I wait for the elevators as I feel lost suddenly in the crowd of patients, doctors, nurses – each one busy and following his or her own thoughts.One picture on the professor’s wall is stuck in my mind. It looks like a typical picture of a doctor holding a newborn baby still attached to his mother through the umbilical cord.I was told it was taken during the most intense lockdown when we were all confined to our houses and forced to keep distance and be away from each other, when hospitals were used mostly for COVID cases and we were all asked to try not to come there unless for a real emergency.Nonetheless, there was one department that had to keep functioning in full force no matter what: the delivery wing in Shaare Zedek.Under that picture of the newborn was written, “No matter what, life goes on here.”Time has a different beat in a delivery room. There is no night or day. It follows the rhythm of nature.How incredible to have spent most of a lifetime creating new life, showing the world that despite all its harshness, God insists every day on the miracle of creation. And the Professor is there to receive it and pass it on to you, just as he said.“I am just a messenger.”A messenger from God.
Who is Prof. Arnon Samueloff?
Samueloff has been a member of the medical committee at Shaare Zedek and the Maternity Department and Pregnancy Complications unit director for 25 years.His professional activity outside the hospital is extensive.He serves as chairman of the Israeli board of Ob/Gyn, as a member of the higher examination committee of the Israel Medical Association and as a member of the judicial committee of the Chief Scientist of the Israeli Health Ministry.He was president of the Israel society of maternal-fetal medicine.He has won national and international recognition for outstanding research work and is the author of more than 200 articles and abstracts, many of which he has presented at national and international meetings.He has acted as supervisor to dozens of doctoral theses for medical students.He teaches at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he was granted the title of Full Professor in 2004.Since 2007 he has been a Full Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.He is a frequent speaker at formal and informal professional forums. – H.C.
