4 days ago
Palestinian-Irish doctor Prof Afif El-Khuffash on hope & identity
Episode 17 of the Insights with Seán O'Rourke podcast features a riveting conversation with Professor Afif El-Khuffash, a Palestinian-Irish consultant neonatologist and a professor of paediatrics working at the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin.
The doctor, who is also a writer and artist, spoke about identity, caring for critically ill babies and the importance of hope in challenging circumstances.
El-Khuffash can still remember many of the pre-term babies he has cared for in his career, but one exceptional case stands out.
"The first ever 24-week-old baby that I looked after 19, 20 years ago", he told Seán. "Five hundred grams, never forget her, so critically unwell. I was just starting out in the field, had a lot of support from the consultant at the time, of course, and she survived."
Neonatal consultants often stay in touch with the families of the babies they care for, which is what El-Khuffash did with this girl's parents for a number of years. He recalled ringing the girl's mother on her birthday each year to celebrate her with them, but then communication dried up.
Then, just three or four months ago, El-Khuffash received a message on Instagram: a photo of a young woman ready to go to her debs.
"The caption on the bottom said, do you know who this is?" El-Khuffash said, laughing: "I started panicking saying, is this a child of mine that I wasn't aware of?"
Eventually, the mother revealed that the woman was the 24-week-old baby El-Khuffash had helped nurture to health.
"That was so wonderful. I was actually having a really bad day that day with things going wrong in the hospital, and it just really reminded me why we do what we do."
Hope has been a throughline for El-Khuffash for much of his career, and is a guiding principle for the doctor, writer and activist in all parts of his life. It's something he has carried both to his artistic work and to his fundraising efforts for Gaza, helping to channel resources into the area.
"My role as a neonatologist... It's primarily about hope, absolutely", he said. "I always think of it as, we can never control the outcome of what happens, you know, in the course of the baby's journey in the neonatal intensive care unit. We can give support, we can give care, but sometimes, unfortunately, the outcomes aren't what we desire. What we control is our communication with the parent and the hope that we can continue to give them throughout the journey of their baby in the ICU."
He told Seán that he never wanted to do medicine, but "almost fell into it by accident". Both of his parents are paediatricians, and he said that seeing them was a way of "scaring me away from doing anything closely related to that because I saw how hard they worked".
He made the snap decision to change from one course to medicine after six months of university, and in the space of a week, he had moved to Ireland from Kuwait. He arrived in Ireland in December 1995 and began studying for the 1996 Leaving Cert, which secured him a spot in Medicine at Trinity.
It was in Trinity that he finally found a sense of identity and confidence in himself after years of personal confusion about his own nationality. He joked that when asked by his now-wife where he was from, he gave her an answer that took five minutes, and at the end of it, his wife was still none the wiser.
El-Khuffash's father is Palestinian, from Marda, a village in the West Bank, and travelled to Egypt to study medicine, but couldn't return after the 1967 war. At the time, Jordan was offering Palestinian nationals amnesty and nationality, which he took to be able to travel. He soon met El-Khuffash's mother, a Kuwaiti woman, in Kuwait.
El-Khuffash was born in Kuwait, but the law at the time required you to have a Kuwaiti father to be recognised as Kuwaiti.
"So there I was, a little boy growing up in Kuwait, being told that you're neither Kuwaiti nor Jordanian, but you're Palestinian. It creates a lot of confusion for somebody growing up in a situation like that.
"For a very long time, I did struggle with identity. Now I say that I'm Palestinian-Irish and I'm sticking to that. It took a long time to actually reach that, and even for somebody that grew up in a place that did its best to remind you you're not from it, it took me a very long time to be comfortable calling myself Irish. I've been an Irish citizen now for 12 years, and only over the last couple of years am I comfortable telling people that I'm Irish."
