Nurse of the Week Pamela Zeinoun was on the fourth floor of Beirut’s Saint George Hospital University Medical Center during the deadly August 4 explosions. As the blasts tore into the hospital and shook the entire building, the 26-year-old nurse was thrown into the neonatal ICU. After freeing herself from the rubble, she searched for her colleagues, then made her way to the incubator.
After a visiting father helped lift some steel shelves that had fallen over the incubating area, Zeinoun retrieved a pair of twins and a third baby, holding them close to keep them warm. With the elevators damaged, she and a St. George gynecologist carefully carried the small patients down four flights of stairs. It was a harrowing experience, she said. “I was scared of slipping, or any of the babies slipping, or me falling on them. I did not want to lose any of them and wanted to get them to safety.”
Zeinoun became an inadvertent media icon when a photojournalist snapped her balancing a phone between her shoulder and ear as she somehow managed to answer an emergency room phone–while holding the three tiny babies nestled against her chest. Having helped the unknown caller, she rejoined the doctor and left the hospital to seek a safe refuge for the infants. “We walked across the streets of Achrafieh area with the babies in our hands,” she recalled. “I asked bystanders, who volunteered to help, to give us their shirts to keep the babies safe. The three newborns are under 2 kilograms each and I had to cover them up and keep them warm otherwise they wouldn’t live.”
Finding a safe hospital to care for the premature infants entailed a long and arduous journey. Zeinoun said, “We walked around five kilometers until we found a car that could help us take the babies to a hospital a bit outside Beirut.” As she sees it, the hazardous trek was a natural extension of her job: “I was responsible for these children and I love them. This is the job that I love. I couldn’t go and leave them… Either I wait … until someone comes to help me or I take them down, and that’s what I did.”
The infants are safe and doing well.
For more details on Pamela Zeinoun and her experience during the Beirut explosion, click here.
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