A grounded look at disaster medicine and system resilience in prolonged crisis.
From Nursing in Crisis to Disaster Medicine
My journey into nursing started with a simple desire — to be present with people in their hardest moments. In Gaza, that work taught me something I hadn't anticipated: what it means to keep providing care when everything around you is breaking down.
Nurses here are also people in crisis, searching for food, water, safety, and shelter for their own families while still showing up for their patients. The hospital door doesn't separate you from the disaster. You carry it with you.
That reality shaped everything that came after for me.
Why I Document This Experience
For healthcare workers on humanitarian missions, documentation often serves as testimony — a way of bearing witness before returning home. My situation is different. Gaza is my home, and what I am documenting is not a chapter that ends when the assignment does.
The stories health professionals carry out of this conflict — the adaptations, the failures, the improvised systems, the impossible decisions — belong in the disaster medicine literature. There is a gap between what is happening on the ground and what research has been able to capture, and lived clinical experience is what starts to close it. That is where this documentation fits. Not as a personal record, but as the beginning of research.
A Shift in Thinking
Gaza showed me how much emergency care depends on the systems around providers — supplies, referrals, transportation, communication, community networks. When those systems fail, care itself changes shape.
That realization reframed how I understand nursing. Clinical skill matters enormously, and healthcare workers need systems designed to adapt, coordinate, and keep functioning when normal conditions no longer exist.
Digging Deeper
Those experiences pushed me toward harder questions:
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How does healthcare continue when a crisis stretches on for months or years?
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How do hospitals and care teams adapt when the systems they depend on are disrupted?
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What does coordination look like before, during, and after severe disruption?
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How can disaster planning better protect patients and the people caring for them?
These became the starting point for my research interests.
Filling Gaps
My interest in this field grew from a gap I kept noticing between what healthcare workers are trained to do and what prolonged crisis actually demands of them.
What I saw in Gaza was how important the aftermath is — the long stretch when the acute phase has passed but the crisis hasn't, and healthcare workers keep adapting without a clear end in sight.
I want to study how disaster response systems organize care over time, support field medicine, maintain continuity, and help communities move toward recovery when standard timelines no longer apply.
Looking Forward
I hope to carry what I learned in Gaza into research that builds stronger systems — better preparedness, smarter emergency response, and recovery pathways that protect both patients and the healthcare workers who serve them.
The goal is understanding how systems can prepare before disruption, hold together during it, and recover in ways that don't leave people behind.