by Dana Halawi
BEIRUT, May 12 (Xinhua) -- She ran downstairs as the blast shook Beirut. It was April 8. An Israeli strike had just hit.
Inside the emergency department at Makassed Hospital, 24-year-old nurse manager Lina Diab found one of the strongest colleagues she knew -- respiratory therapist and nurse manager Marwa Omeirat -- standing over a severely injured child, trying to intubate him while crying.
"Marwa, focus. Where are you?" Diab shouted, as explosions echoed and wounded civilians flooded in.
Moments later, she found herself treating a man burned beyond recognition.
"We kept asking his name, but he could not answer," Diab recalled.
Nearly an hour passed. Then he opened his eyes. "God bless you," he whispered, "You helped me."
He later died. His own family could not recognize him at first.
That scene, repeated across Beirut's hospitals, captures what Lebanese nurses now live with every day. On International Nurses Day, Tuesday, they described a profession transformed by years of economic collapse, the 2020 Beirut port explosion, and a new conflict between Israel and Hezbollah that has turned hospitals into places where medical care and emotional survival are inseparable.
"Every day is long and exhausting," Diab said. "At any moment, there might be an explosion or an emergency. You feel pressure all the time."
Omeirat cannot forget the aftermath of the pager attacks. Those patients were among the thousands of victims of an Israeli operation on Sept. 17-18, 2024, when explosive-laden pagers and walkie-talkies detonated across Lebanon and Syria, targeting Hezbollah members. According to Lebanese reports, at least 42 people were killed and over 3,400 injured, many left permanently disabled -- blinded, disfigured, or without hands.
Omeirat recalled one patient who had lost both eyes and all 10 fingers.
"I thought he was dead while checking his pulse," she said, "Then suddenly he told me: 'I'm alive.'"
Then there was a young girl who arrived without eyes, too shocked to cry.
"She barely spoke. It was a shocking scene," she said.
At Al Rassoul al-Aazam Hospital, emergency nurse Mohammad Berro recalled the pager attacks as the most difficult moment: "There was no space left. Everyone was suffering."
What affected Berro most were the patients who, despite catastrophic injuries, told him, "Take care of someone else first. I can wait."
The conflict has forced nurses to become emotional counsellors, social supporters, and sometimes the only source of comfort for displaced families and wounded civilians.
"It is not just medical care anymore," Berro said. "You have to know how to deal with patients and families emotionally."
Diab agreed, "The nurse becomes everything. People ask about their health, their families, their fears, even financial concerns."
One patient from the south told her how her son was killed in an explosion before she fled her home. As the patient recounted the story, she began to cry, then apologized for disturbing the nurse.
"The patients feel lost," Diab noted. "Sometimes what they need most is emotional support."
That may be the quietest truth emerging from Beirut's shattered wards: Being deeply human, even while crying over a child you are trying to save, is not a weakness. It may be the only medicine left.
Yet the nurses need medicine, too.
"We are human, too," Omeirat said. "We cry, we scream, we try to release the pressure somehow. Sometimes on my way home, I just cry in the car while listening to music."
Myrna Abi-Abdallah Doumit, professor of nursing at the American University of Beirut and a board member of the International Council of Nurses representing the Eastern Mediterranean region, warned that low salaries, burnout and emigration are threatening the profession's future in Lebanon.
"The most experienced and highly-educated nurses left the country," Doumit said. "And we still do not have proper retention plans."
Meanwhile, Doumit called those who chose to stay remarkable: "Many nurses were working under fire while their own families were threatened or displaced. This shows the resilience Lebanese nurses have developed over the years."
"What keeps me going is when a patient calls us angels of mercy," Diab said. "At that moment, I forget all the exhaustion."
Years of trauma have not shaken Omeirat's calling, either.
"If I could go back in time, I would still choose nursing," she said. "It is difficult and exhausting, but it is deeply human." ■
