When the heart stops: A nurse's witness to a miracle in Israel

As a neonatal intensive care nurse from the United States, it was a privilege to be asked to scrub into the operating room (OR) of Edith Wolfson Medical Center with the team from ALL ISRAEL NEWS on behalf of Save a Child's Heart (SACH).

The female patient was a three-year-old who traveled all the way from Malawi with her mother and a nurse to have a hole in her heart repaired.

I may have been in a foreign country, but the whole experience felt anything but foreign. The procedures of preparing to go into the OR were second nature – the familiar routine of gowning and gloving, and the sharp scent of antiseptic that nurses everywhere know all too well.

The monitors and equipment were different and newer, but the mission was the same. We were here to save a child’s heart.

Walking into that operating room, I felt the quiet electricity that every surgical nurse recognizes – that collective focus, that unspoken agreement among everyone in the room that what happens in the next few hours matters more than almost anything else in the world.

A small body lay on the table, draped and prepped, her tiny chest cracked open, waiting for the hands of the skillful surgeons to make the necessary repairs.

And then came the moment no amount of training fully prepares you for – the moment the lead surgeon says these four words:

"I'm stopping the heart."

The surgeon's voice was calm. Clinical. He had said these words before – hundreds of times. But I had never heard them spoken over a child, only over adults, when I worked for a year in Surgical Telemetry and had the opportunity to witness many open-heart procedures.

I initially stood still and then moved across the room to share with my colleagues what was happening and why this was so important.

On the monitor above us, we all watched the heart – this fierce, faithful little muscle that had been working so hard for three years despite its imperfection – begin to slow. The beats grew further apart. And then, one final flutter, and the line went flat.

The room went silent.

You could hear a pin drop.

There are no words that quite capture what it is like to stand in a room where a child's heart has been intentionally stopped. It is not death – every mind in that room knows that – and yet something ancient and instinctive in you responds to that flatline as if it were.

I blinked back tears behind my mask as I offered a silent prayer on behalf of the child and her family.

Around me, the surgeons moved with calm precision, their hands steady, their eyes focused entirely on the work now laid open before them. The hole that had robbed this little girl of a full life was finally within reach.

This is what the surgical team at Save a Child's Heart does. Again and again, they bring children from countries with limited access to cardiac care – African countries of Malawi, Zanzibar, Zambia, Ethiopia, and even more locally, such as the West Bank – and repair their hearts so they can be made whole and go on to live long lives, God willing.

To date, over 8,500 surgeries have been performed on children from 75 countries, using cutting-edge technology that, in some cases, is found nowhere else in the world.

Surgeons and anesthesiologists travel from across the globe to train with the Israeli team, then return home equipped to save children who, without this knowledge and clinical training, would have no chance at all. 

I didn’t stay for the entirety of the surgery as there was more to see in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). On the way to the PICU, the team spoke with a couple of mothers in the waiting room. If they were nervous, you never would have known it. Rather, they expressed hope and full faith in the Israeli medical team to restore their children to health.

The end of the tour brought us to the recovery home, where the children continue to improve after their hospital stay. There is even a professional kitchen where the mothers can prepare special meals for their children and for themselves – a taste of home cooking far from home.

We also met students volunteering at SACH during their gap year following high school. Several were visibly emotional as they recounted stories that had deeply impacted them and spoke about the children and families they had grown to love during their time of service.

Their stories were a reminder that Save a Child's Heart is about far more than surgery. It is about restoring hope to families, building friendships across cultures, and giving children a chance at a future they might otherwise never have.

While I haven’t spent months serving like the volunteers, I will never forget my few hours with the staff and families as I got an inside look into what they do to save a child’s heart.

To volunteer at Save a Child’s Heart, please check out this link here.