When I hesitatingly question the source of her rock-steady faith, Avital looks surprised. “I wasn’t a child,” she said. “I had had plenty of time to strengthen my beliefs.” I probe deeper, asking if perhaps she had been even momentarily angry with Hashem. “Not at all,” she replies. “When you don’t have anyone else to turn to…that’s when you’re tied to Hashem the closest.”
The Long Road To Recovery
Two weeks after the attack, a team of surgeons explained to Avital how they were going to repair her crushed eye socket. “We’ll cut across your scalp, pull down the skin, and then insert a platinum plate and screws,” they said. “In the end, no one will be able to tell what you’ve been through.” Of course, everyone made sure that Avital wouldn’t see herself. But one day, as she was being made to sit up to exercise her lungs, she caught sight of herself in a mirror. “My shaven head was double its normal size and the skin was stapled in place,” she recalls as she shares the hardest part of her recovery. “Every time I saw myself, I got a shock. It was harder than relearning how to sit and walk.”
Avital’s facial injuries were numerous: her jaw remained stubbornly locked and had to be slowly forced open. She lost much of the hearing in her left ear. She is blind in her left eye. “I have to undergo a third surgery to restore some of my hearing and also surgery to tighten the muscles in my blind eye to stop it from wandering. But you know how these things go…you push them off,” she says.
Avital’s body was also injured. “My hand remained open and it took hours of physiotherapy to force the muscles to stretch so that my fingers could curl towards my palm,” she says. She also underwent numerous grafts to rebuild her left thigh where shrapnel had blown away part of the flesh.
Although the large pieces of shrapnel were removed, smaller pieces are still embedded. “Sometimes when I put pressure on them, they hurt—like an enormous splinter. I have pieces in my neck and arm that play up periodically,” she says matter-of-factly. “I had plenty of visitors when I was in hospital, she adds, “including an American teenage tourist who strummed her guitar for me. “But it was OneFamily that was always there for me to encourage me with their caring.”
Moving On
Three years after the attack, Avital returned to teaching part-time. This year, she began to work full-time. “When I was in hospital, I saw people who were much worse off than me: they had lost limbs, some of them were living on medication to control their PTSD symptoms. I’ve never stopped thanking Hashem for His kindness to me. You see, you need a healthy soul to raise children,” says the proud mother of four.
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What Happened to Tair?
A piece of shrapnel completely removed a section of the bone of Tair’s lower leg. In an effort to encourage the bone to regenerate, for the next two years, her leg was encased in plaster from the hip down. “It was heavy to carry around,” Tair says, shuffling the pack of cards she’s holding. Today, her left foot is more than a size smaller than the right one, and although she too has shrapnel pieces throughout her body, they don’t hurt her.
Lightly, Heavily or Critically Injured
According to Professor Shmuel Shapira, Deputy Director General of Hadassah University Hospital, “lightly injured” generally means that there is no danger to life or to any organ of the patient’s body (aish.com). That means that a terror victim who suffers fractured limbs, burns and/or shrapnel injuries that do not bleed all over the legs, arms, and face would be categorized as “lightly injured.” These physical wounds may require weeks of hospitalization, repeated surgeries, months of rehabilitation and frequent visits to the outpatient clinic for a year or longer. The psychological trauma of the light injuries may be even more devastating, leading in the worst cases to chronic unemployment, divorce, and sometimes suicide. Seems that the term “lightly injured” is a misnomer! Going back to Avital…she was heavily wounded.
