Abeerah Muhammad had already applied to be part of a medical mission to Gaza before the current conflict began and a great need for trauma nurses emerged. With the support of her husband and other family members, she traveled to the conflict zone to volunteer at European Gaza Hospital for about two weeks in May 2024.
“They know I have a bleeding heart,” she said.
Although she is has trained with FEMA and the American Red Cross and volunteered after natural disasters such as 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, what she saw during the mission were “unprecedented levels of trauma”: burns, gunshot wounds, disease, infection, dehydration and starvation.
She quickly learned that Palestinian trauma protocols are similar to TNCC. They all needed to rely on their assessment skills and adapt to being cut off from many basic resources such as the diagnostic labs she was accustomed to in her role as a PRN emergency nurse at Baylor Scott & White hospitals in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex.
“To see how people work with much less is inspiring. It makes you want to strive to be better,” Muhammad said.
Despite the devastation around them, the nurses shared the same kinds of relationships and coping skills she sees at home.
“There was a lot of camaraderie. As happens here, there was trauma bonding. Jokes and humor were coping mechanisms,” she said.
She encountered warmth, generosity and a perspective shaped by both a hospitality culture and the common threat of violence. Colleagues and even patients readily offered to share their food and water. One ED nurse surprised the team when he showed up the day after a particularly tough night of mass casualties passing around a box of candies and informing them he had gotten married that morning.
“He said, ‘I love her. The next day is not guaranteed, so why not get married?’ It was such a beautiful moment in the midst of this death and destruction and rubble everywhere,” Muhammad said.
In November 2024, the Journal of Emergency Nursing, published Muhammad’s paper, “Caring for Women in an Active War Zone,” detailing the extreme difficulties for female patients she witnessed. She said writing the paper was one of the things that helped her process the devastation she was immersed in for nearly two weeks.
Her love of travel, her “bleeding heart” and her trauma nursing skills mean another mission is likely in her future. In fact, one reason she works as a PRN is the flexibility it allows for her to leave for a week or two at a time on short notice. She encourages other nurses to consider volunteer work, which doesn’t need to be in a war zone halfway around the world.
“There are a lot of noble causes, a lot of places that can use our service. We have the skills to do it,” Muhammad said.
Muhammad has many relatives who are physicians and had considered medical school for herself. At 19, she worked as a scribe in a Level I trauma center, where she observed the roles nurses played and the time they could spend with patients, which tipped her decision toward a BSN from University of Texas. She also holds a master’s in nursing education from Western Governors University. She worked as an EMT, primarily in an emergency department, for about four years before she began working as an emergency nurse seven years ago.
“The more I worked with nurses, the more I fell in love with it. I thought these people are so cool – saving lives one minute, comforting someone the next, having these great interactions,” she said. “I like interacting with people and learning their stories.”