This story is from the words of Dr. Hossam Hamdan, a doctor in Ghouta, about his painful experience today:

“It is a cry I hear every day, but today was different than any other day. 
A 14 year old, expressionless is trying to manage the pain he is feeling because part of his intestines were blown out of his stomach.
He looked at me and asked, “Are you going to do my surgery?”
I told him yes. 
He said, “Please take extra good care of me, my mother is waiting outside and I promised her I would return quickly.”
I asked him, “Where is your father?”
He replied: “He was killed two months ago, along with all of my siblings in the market bombing. My mother is waiting for me, I am her only family.”
I had no words to say… nothing but silence… I started to anesthetize him for the surgery. As I held my scalpel, an overwhelming feeling took over me. I felt as if I was opening the stomachs of a whole family, and I was sewing a torn father’s body, along with all of his children, and that I was transferring the blood to the soul of the last remaining child of this family, as the mother anxiously awaits her son to emerge from the surgery. My hand starts shaking as my heart envisions his mother’s eyes as they are filled with tears of oppression... of feeling overwhelmed with pain and helplessness. I literally hear the beats of her heart as she anxiously waits for me to let her know her last remaining child is going to be OK. I tried to finish as fast as I could to let her know he was going to survive. 
I finished the surgery, my feet racing before me to tell his mother the surgery ended and was a success. I did not see her anywhere, I couldn’t find her anywhere in the building; not in the crowded waiting rooms, not in the hallways or corridors; she was nowhere to be found. 
I ran to the street… I finally found her, under a broken tree much like her broken heart. This is not how I imagined I would find her. Her clothes were covered in dust from the bombings as she was calmly kneeling in prayer, weeping quietly with such pain and anguish in her voice. She was repeating how her son told her he was wounded in the road, “Oh mother I have been wounded in the road!” She was raising her hands to the sky because she knew no one else would respond, the whole world turned a blind eye and abandoned them. She was praying for her son, when she finally saw me she said, “ I know my son is OK, thank you so much for everything, may God reward you.”
#Ghouta #Syria