"Look at the equipment," he said. "It's all contaminated."
He pointed to a tray splotched with iodine solution. On it was a jumble of scissors, gauze and gloves smeared with blood. Flies gathered on plastic bags, perched next to coils of suture thread and used IV tubes. A lone, portable radiator warmed the room. Drips of blood across the floor led to the rickety metal beds where patients were propped on thin mattresses sheathed in plastic. On the reception desk, next to the register of patients, was a rotary telephone that never rang.
Medics carried Hazim Abdul Husain, 32, to Yarmouk after he was wounded in a roadside bombing on Wednesday.
(Mohammed Uraibi -- AP)
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An endless procession of patients and their friends and relatives approached Rubaie with questions: Is he going to be all right? Can we take him home? When will the pain stop? To each, Rubaie answered politely, usually with a reassuring "Don't worry."
"Everybody does what they can do," he said. "If I get depressed, I can't work. If I don't, who will? They're our people."
He turned to Hadi Abdel-Karim, a 32-year-old nurse, and grabbed his hand.
"The nurses are the heroes," he said.
Abdel-Karim has worked as a nurse for 12 years, two of them at Yarmouk, where he has seen perhaps 60 friends, relatives and neighbors enter the emergency room's doors as corpses or injured. Today was tolerable, he said -- nothing like the attack in October that still haunts him, when dozens of children were killed by twin car bombs. That attack unleashed hysteria and chaos at the hospital. The staff received the dead just past the barbed wire at the building's entrance: By Abdel-Karim's count, there were 43 killed, along with 132 wounded.
He said he worked 32 hours straight.
"I couldn't believe it," he recalled. "When we finished with one patient, three more would come. I can't forget it."
Gaunt and soft-spoken, Abdel-Karim fell silent for a moment. "God is generous," he said. "God willing, things will get better, but I don't see how. Day after day, it gets worse. I see the reality every day
People Without a Choice
The shift wore on, and phrases became familiar. "God forbid" was uttered often. In one bed was 18-year-old Ramzi Mohammed, shot in the foot while riding a bicycle when a clash erupted between U.S. troops and insurgents. Two beds down was Mishaan Fadhil, a 62-year-old bus driver with a bullet lodged in his neck. He said it was fired by U.S. troops.
Across the room was Shaalan Tarish, 40, wounded by a mine that targeted an American military convoy in the neighborhood of Dora. No U.S. troops were killed, and the attack merited no more than a paragraph in the day's newspaper coverage.
Tarish's chest was bruised and his face bandaged, concealing a gash on the left side. A friend, an Egyptian named Khalil Mohammed who has lived in Iraq for 24 years, stood next to him.
"In this situation, I'd like to go home. Today would be better than tomorrow," the friend said. "Even the Iraqis want to leave. If anyone had the money, he wouldn't stay longer than an hour. Everyone in here is poor."
