We pass numerous "beware of camels by the road" signs, and several actual camels, during the 40 minutes drive to the hospital. It's easy, having lived here for three years, to forget how so very different everything is from where I grew up.

It's Yom Kippur here, which means that the entire country is shut down. No flights, no traffic lights, no traffic. It's pretty stunning. Cliche to talk about, but it's a pretty powerful thing to see the center of Jerusalem just absolutely dead, to be able to walk in the middle of the street. And it's sooo quiet.

The quiet is much needed, to be honest. It's been an unbelievably long week full of sleep-deprivation, patient after patient after patient, being yelled at by nurses, doctors, and patients alike.

We have a not-surprising amount of patients from Sderot who end up in the internal medicine ward and turn out to be more post-traumatic-stress-disordered than anything else. Our hospital is where all the kazaam rocket victims end up, and fortunately there are happily few physical injuries- but we get all sorts of anxiety disorders, depression, eating disorders etc. from that area. I understand being attached to where you live but it's hard for me to understand why so many people are still living there. Especially families with children. We saw a 14 year old boy last week who stopped eating after a rocket fell near his house. We kept him for a few days to rehydrate him, but what he needs isn't exactly a hospital, really.

The rest of our patients have been an interesting mix. The usual 70-80 year youngs with heart disease, dementia, anemia etc., a bunch of fevers of unknown origin. It's been more difficult than I expected. An endless stream of new patients to admit, needles to stick in people, 10 page reports to write, 30 minute presentations. I wake up at 6am, get to the hospital at 7:15, get home at 5pm, with only a 40 minute lunch break in between. I literally don't sit down the entire day except for morning meeting and lunch. I also made the mistake last week of doing on-call on Sunday night this week, which means that I started the week with a 20 hour day and really never recovered.

For those who are unfamiliar with the middle-eastern idea of hospitality, I'll explain. You cannot enter someone's home here without being offered a hot drink, a cold drink, cookies/cake, and fruit. And it's not something you can say no to. The same atmosphere carries over into the hospital. There are constantly cookies in the on-call room, and someone makes coffee for everyone on a half-hourly basis. And not normal coffee. Turkish coffee. Which is basically tar and tree bark in a cup with a lot of sugar in it. They actually use the sludge that stays in the bottom of the cup to read the future, like tea leaves. I attempt this from time to time during the morning meetings in a vague attempt to amuse myself. I'm doing my best to de-caffeinate, it's a losing battle. I try to take only a sip or two and then discretely dispose of the rest, but still I feel like a permanent hole has been burned through my stomach.