Wounded in Gaza RPG attack, ICU doctor is treated, unrecognized, by his own colleagues
When the ICU team at Soroka Hospital admitted a reservist seriously wounded and unconscious after an attack in Khan Younis, they didn’t realize it was their colleague Yoav Bichovsky
Yoav Bichovsky, a senior doctor at the intensive care unit at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, wasn’t recognizable to his own colleagues when he returned to the hospital from reserve duty as a combat medic — this time, as a patient, unconscious and seriously wounded.
Bichovsky, 47, volunteered on October 7, after the Hamas terror group’s deadly attack on southern Israel, when thousands of terrorists invaded the country from Gaza, killing 1,200 people, taking 251 hostages, and sparking the ongoing war in the Strip.
Bichovsky was sent to Gaza intermittently, returning to his work at the hospital in between. But on March 31, after he had been serving for three days in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, an RPG struck his vehicle, seriously wounding him and two other soldiers.
When Bichovsky, along with the other two injured soldiers, arrived at the hospital, he was unconscious and suffering from a head injury. Staff took his fingerprints and entered them into the military identification database, but he wasn’t identified.
Strikingly, none of those treating Bichovsky, many of whom knew him well, recognized him either at first, until Adam Saparov, an intensive care doctor and close friend of Bichovsky, realized the patient’s identity.
“From the outside it sounds very strange, but you must understand, when a wounded person arrives, in the first few minutes or even the first few hours, sometimes it’s very hard to identify him. I won’t get into the graphic details, but it’s hard sometimes,” Amit Frenkel, one of Bichovsky’s colleagues, told Channel 12 news in a report broadcast on Saturday night.
Professor Alexander Zlotnik, of the anesthesiology division at Soroka, attributed his own failure to recognize Bichovsky not to his colleague’s physical state, but to an inner psychological block: “It was some kind of blackout in my brain— I wasn’t ready to accept it,” he told Channel 12.
“[Dr. Saparov] told me, ‘Shachar, it’s Bichovsky, look at his fingers, his jaw, his nose,'” recounted anesthesiologist Shachar Negev. “I told him: It’s not him. I just don’t see it.”
Then Negev opened the patient’s eyes. “Yoel has a very special color to his eyes, a green that not a lot of people have, and they were that same green,” she recounted. “Little by little, the understanding seeped in.”
The Soroka team then decided to inform Bichovsky’s wife that he had been admitted, rather than wait for the military to tell her what had happened.
“We really hesitated about whether to do that,” Frenkel said. “The Israeli expression, ‘A knock on the door’ [from the IDF with bad news] — that’s become an awful, chilling expression… It was clear to us that we had to [inform the family, rather than have them hear from the army].”
Frenkel and a few other colleagues of Bichovsky went to his home, first calling his wife Esther from outside, and told her of the situation, emphasizing that they didn’t consider Bichovsky’s condition life-threatening.
There was also some deliberation about whether the Soroka team should provide ongoing treatment or transfer Bichovsky elsewhere, to a team that did not have a personal connection to the patient.
“That night, there was a question about whether we should treat him ourselves,” Professor Moti Klein, of Bichovsky’s unit, told Channel 12. But “the thought that he would be treated somewhere else was harder to stomach than that we would treat him.”
“Everything that’s happened since the 7th [of October], it comes home to us. And here, it came home to us, to our family,” said Alex Fichman, another of Bichovsky’s colleagues at Soroka. “Our problem was, we know too much.”
“We know how severe a head injury is, how serious the consequences can be afterward,” elaborated Michal Zada, a nurse in the ward. “And Yoav is someone that you can’t imagine [as a patient] in the unit; you can’t imagine him lying in a bed,” Zada said.
“I asked who would be able — mentally — to treat him, without breaking down. There were nurses who said it was too hard, that they were afraid they wouldn’t stop crying,” she told Channel 12.
Return to consciousness
Over the weeks after he was admitted and placed on life-support, Bichovsky gradually responded to treatment.
On May 5, he responded to a WhatsApp message from Saparov, a landmark moment. At that point, said Saparov, “I understood that he was himself again, 35 days after he was helicoptered in” from Gaza.
His colleagues had worried whether Bichovsky would be the same man they knew before, but joked among themselves that “Yoav, as someone super-intelligent, has a lot to spare, so it’s okay if he goes down a few levels,” Frenkel said.
“It was very strange at first,” Bichovsky told Channel 12, reflecting on his return to consciousness and subsequent progress. “You’re a little like a doll,” he said, being handled by others with little input of your own.
“It’s really a great team,” he said of his colleagues. “They were always saying, ‘Don’t forget, I’m the nurse, I’m the doctor, I’m the therapist, it’ll be fine.’”
Bichovsky is now in an intensive six-month process of rehabilitation at the Loewenstein Hospital Rehabilitation Center in Ra’anana, working on speech, motor skills, and other basic functions, and has been making rapid progress.
He speaks in something of a whisper now — one of his vocal cords was half-paralyzed by the RPG attack. But he spoke of hope for the future, saying he expects “to return home, to eat like a human being, regular things. To be a dad.”
Asked whether he intends to return to the intensive care unit — as a doctor again this time — Bichovsky was unequivocal: “Yes,” he said. “It’s amazing work. It’s an amazing life.”
