By Janis Siegel, Jewish Sound Correspondent
The babies in the neo-natal unit of the Hadassah University Medical Center in Ein Kerem, Jerusalem, will be the first, followed by the children, and then the terminally ill who will be prioritized for evacuation if rockets fall and terrorists strike inside of Israel.
These patients will move to what might be one of the country’s safest places to shelter — a state-of-the-art, world-class, self-ventilating, stainless-steel-walled surgical suite, one of 20 newly built operating rooms located on five below-ground floors underneath the hospital.
Above it and accessible to pedestrians sits the new 14-story Sarah Wetsman Davidson hospital tower, a 500-bed facility officially opened two years ago but becoming functional one unit at a time, as they are funded and furnished.
“The surgical wards and the intensive care unit are there now, internal medicine, cardiology, and a few others will hopefully move next year, but we are operating in our old building,” said Dr. Asher Salmon, the new deputy director at Hadassah University Hospital when he met with the the Jewish Sound in mid-October during a trip to the Seattle area.
While in town, Salmon spoke to 180 Hadassah supporters and met with scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to discuss the possibilities for working together on future research projects.
Hadassah Hospital needs to raise an additional $5 million to equip the operating rooms.
“The main project now for us is finishing our underground operating theatres,” said Salmon, a groundbreaking oncologist, cutting-edge researcher, and health care administrator. “Nothing could hit them — chemical or biological. They have a very sophisticated air purification system.”
This past summer, at the Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, where Salmon was the deputy CEO and medical director from 2012 to 2014, surgeries were interrupted by more than 200 rockets, he said. But now that all of Israel is vulnerable to these kinds of attacks, Hadassah Hospital must be prepared.
Hadassah’s Seattle chapter raised more than $50,000 in one evening, which was matched by a gift from Hadassah donors through its New York headquarters. Susan Adler, president-elect for Seattle Chapter Hadassah, said the chapter reached its fundraising goals for the event.
“We raised over $55,000 and are still counting,” she said.
If the fundraising continues to be successful, hospital staff could move all of its departments into the tower by the New Year.
“They’re hoping to open all the operating rooms by January,” Adler said.
Ultimately, it’s about the science carried out within its walls that will allow researchers like Salmon to continue searching for therapies to do battle against breast and ovarian cancer, the presence of the BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 genetic mutations in Ashkenazi Jewish women and related genetic screening techniques, and developing tumor radiation methods that spare healthy tissue.
“A woman who has found that she’s carrying the BRCA mutation has to go through a very clear surveillance program,” said Salmon, “both for her breast and her ovaries.”
As a proactive approach, Salmon recommends that a high-risk woman remove both ovaries once she’s had her family.
“We would usually recommend that a woman like that finish her family planning, having the number of children she would like to have, and have an oophorectomy before the age of 40,” Salmon said.
If a woman is at high risk for breast cancer, said Salmon, he recommends an MRI screening and a mammogram every year after the age of 35.
“Unfortunately, among Ashkenazi Jews, the mutations are very common in almost 3 percent of those who carry this mutation,” he said. “Two hundred years ago, it wasn’t really a problem because life expectancy was much shorter, women would menstruate at a later age, they would breastfeed for years, and they would die early. Breast cancer would develop in later life, if at all.”
“Now, women become fertile at an earlier age,” he said, “have a much smaller number of pregnancies, get pregnant later, don’t breastfeed, and are exposed to hormones. The fact is that it has become a much bigger problem.”