I am sitting in the waiting room of the Intensive Care Unit at Dana Children’s Hospital, on Weizman Blvd.
A few hours ago my eleven-year old daughter was hit by a car. Her rail-thin body lobbed into a perfect parabola, she landed 90 feet away. An ambulance brought her here. Israel’s best and brightest pored over every inch of her body, inside and out. She has extensive bruising and a hairline hip fracture. That’s it. The doctors can’t believe it, so she’s scheduled to spend a day in the ICU and then a week at the hospital, “just in case” (nothing happened). Now she’s sitting up in her bed inside the ICU, reading a book. In the next bed a toddler, brain-dead from a car accident, lies silent. His father, a thick-set Arab villager, stands by his bed and mutters “Yallah, Ahmed, yallah”, again and again, like a mantra. My child, awash in her own adrenaline, is oblivious.
So I watch the faces around me, and like an ermine cape – a symbol of privilege, fraught with responsibility – the realization descends on me: I Am The Luckiest Man On Earth.
