S.F. surgeon operates under fire in Israel

As Katyushas bombarded Israel’s northern border, within yards of the hospital where he was volunteering, San Francisco surgeon Dr. William Schecter fought terror attacks hands-on — in the operating room.

Running on minimal sleep, he dashed between lodgings in Rosh Pina and Rebecca Sieff Hospital in Safed, awaiting military casualties, treating Lebanese and Israeli civilians, and occasionally giving lectures on caring for mass casualties.

“Today was a very bad day,” he wrote in an Aug. 7 email posted on an ABC News blog. That day a missile landed amid a group of Israeli reservists on the Lebanese border. Nine were killed immediately, a 10th died in the field while receiving treatment “and the 11th died in our operating room with penetrating injuries to the head, neck and a branch of the coronary artery. I opened his chest, but we could not restart his heart. A most depressing day.”

Back in San Francisco last week, after twice extending a trip originally planned to lecture at a conference, Schecter spoke about his volunteer service in Israel. He visits twice a year to teach courses on trauma surgery to military physicians.

“I don’t consider that I did anything really special. I was just doing my job,” said the chief of surgery at San Francisco General Hospital.

The family of 29-year-old Shai Golan disagrees. Golan was hit by a Katyusha outside his home in northern Israel and was airlifted to the hospital in Safed, where he was declared clinically dead. Refusing to give up, Schecter operated for four hours. While Golan remains in critical condition, his mother, Dalia Golan, credits Schecter with giving her son a new life.

“He’s not just a doctor ... he is a midwife,” Dalia Golan told cousin Orna Morad of Palo Alto in a phone conversation. “Because of him, my son was reborn.”

A native New Yorker, Schecter first visited Israel in 1960, at age 12. “I was deeply moved by my experience there and vowed to continue my association with the country, one way or another,” he said.

Later he spent a summer at an Israeli agricultural high school and wound up working primarily on the farm, rather than participating in the summer camp.

His Israel service isn’t his only medical volunteer work. In 1993, he co-founded Operation Access with surgeon Douglas Grey to provide surgical care to the uninsured. Today it is a network of more than 300 medical volunteers throughout the Bay Area. Schecter received a 2006 Excellence in Medicine award from the American Medical Association, and he has received five Excellence in Teaching awards from UCSF, where he is vice chair of surgery.

Schecter said he became a doctor because “I wanted to lead as significant a life as possible. I wanted to help.” He began serving in Israel in 1990 as an instructor to military physicians.

He spent six months in 2004 at Shaare Tzedek Hospital in Jerusalem as a member of the surgery department. He also ran a course for the nursing staff in trauma care, and researched the role of civilian hospitals in the management of mass casualties.

In his work at San Francisco General, he sees trauma injuries all too often.

During his first morning on rounds after he returned from Israel last week, Schecter saw “as many gunshots wounds in one morning as I saw the whole time in Israel.”

How did Schecter wind up on the warfront in Israel? Because he was already in the country when war broke out, teaching physicians at an army base, he phoned the chief of surgery at the Safed hospital and “asked if he needed another pair of hands.”

Reflecting on his wartime service, he said, “I think it’s given me more experience with the systematic approach to mass-casualty events, and it’s a lot easier to take care of people when someone else is not shooting at you.”

Schecter is not the only physician in his family. His wife, Gisela, is a specialist in infectious diseases and consultant to the state of California on multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. His son, Sam, is about to graduate from medical school in Australia.

Meanwhile, daughter Anna Schecter, an ABC News journalist who shared her father’s emails on the network’s blog, wrote, “I am so happy that my father could be in Israel and contribute his expertise to bikur cholim [healing the sick] at such a crucial time. I am so proud of him.”




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