RULIN NEEDS MEDICINE, FAST

Bearing privacy & dangerous specifics in mind:

I've just heard from Rulin for the first time in maybe a week, and it turns out she was quiet because she's in a hospital, coughing up blood, relying on a dwindling supply of painkillers.

Rulin has a very serious infection of the spinal cord and brain. There IS a treatment that, with time, becomes a cure – a course of one particular antibiotic – but the only known supply of that cure is in South Gaza, with the IDF now back in full free-fire operation and all the roads blockaded.

This would be a harrowing disease for anyone; for a Gaza Palestinian, 18 months famine, thirst, exhaustion, immune-system damage, constant exposure to dangerous particulates and fumes, and equally constant exposure to tainted water all mean that any disease, including this one, will be at its most virulent and potentially fatal.

There may be a chance to get the medicine; I won't elaborate, for the sake of everyone involved, but you may trust that I'm apprised of the major details. That chance requires serious cash for a dangerous job. The numbers aren't exact, but as it stands, the price is likely $4,500.

I would ask you to consider, for a moment, the fact that's been tormenting me since I heard this news: we're not just dealing with a deadly disease, we're dealing with the IDF's proclivity for blowing up hospitals. Rulin is far too ill to be anywhere else, that's just not possible, but I fear that anything involving a hospitalized person in Gaza is a question of how long it takes Israel to aim its Yankee guns at that particular hospital.

It's hard to project anything else about the course of the illness, given the unusual extremity of Rulin's situation; nobody knows what happens next, or when, save that it won't be a turn for the better without medication.

I'm sorry, I don't know if I should say more, address anything more generally, apply the thin gruel of "context" an American can manage in talking about Gaza; I have been frightened for these people, I have been enraged on their behalf, I have marveled at them for a hundred reasons, but this one is something different. This one feels like the nauseous presence of Death I recognize from my own stupid life, and the vertigo that takes over when you realize that thought and will and mercy mean nothing to a body that's dying. You will not think or hope or believe your way out of it. You will no longer be permitted the comforting fiction that "the mind" is a trascendent immaterial principle and "the body" merely its rude medium. And, in the "right" situation, you can feel your body start to die before your mind does; you can feel that you will be aware, though likely unable to communicate, the upward progress of death. I would not propose the laughable comparison of anything I've ever known to the experience of trying to survive a genocide, but I do know what it's like to feel, with simple unambiguous certainty, that Death is standing close to you, and that no product of the mind will earn Death's exemption for any part of the body. I know the feeling that the world is blurring out, and the brain shutting down, from the periphery inward, and I know what it's like to wonder what "the center" is, to wonder what core must be destroyed to transform you from "dying" to "dead," to doubt increasingly that there is any such center, to see the rain-blur on your inner eye get darker and more opaque and to know: That's it. At some point it all gets just dark enough.

Thank you all

M