The story of Rafi El Mazloum, 35 years old, an Italian-Syrian coroner and, as he says, «more Venetian than many Venetians» helps to demonstrate how powerful the Hippocratic oath can be if intertwined with the little-told tale of new Italians. And the tale of the many foreign doctors who caught the public’s attention only in the most dramatic moment of the pandemic. El Mazloum was born in Damascus, to parents who immigrated to Italy to study Medicine in Padua: his father Omar was a pediatrician and his mother, Samar Sinjab, a GP, indeed a family doctor, nowadays a rare or even mythical figure in the hospital-centric Italian health system that pays little attention to community care.
His mother died of Covid-19 on the 9th of April in Mira, a town of 35,000 inhabitants in the province of Venice. And now, since his sister Dania works in Lido di Venezia as a pediatrician like their father, he has been left alone to carry on the family clinic, which opened in 2003, to talk to his patients who tell him I lost a mother, a sister, a friend, a daughter…
Rafi El Mazloum’s family always had a strong vocation for medicine, and it had always been their bread-and-butter. “We talked about it at breakfast, lunch and dinner,” says Rafi, who reacted with apparent quiet determination at the devastating grief of the death of his mother, who herself did not hold back in the face of the emergency and continued to assist her many patients, with only a surgical mask for protection. And while he was telling her story over the phone, her mother’s patients started a petition because they wanted him to replace her.
I specialized in forensic science at the University of Padua, but in our clinic, I always handled the patients together with my mother. She had 1600 in total and I know all their stories.
He was born in Damascus and spent the summer holidays there as a youngster, but then the war put a stop to that. However, in his DNA, he has that community feeling that can only be gained if you grow up in Veneto. In fact, he repeats the mantra that all, or almost all, Venetians have said and reiterated in these dramatic weeks: “We are a compact and united people, we will get out of this”.
Dr. Rafi El Mazloum tells us how he grew up in Mira, a small town where everyone knows each other. “There were never any problems, a dirty look or even an episode of discrimination. When my father came to Italy in the late 1970s, he might have been seen as being different, but today there are many Italian- Syrian doctors in Veneto.” On his Facebook profile there are many people who wanted to write their heartfelt partings to his mother who had welcomed them like members of the family to their clinic, where his father practiced in the largest room, before being struck down by a heart attack in 2007. After his mother died, Rafi El Mazloum wrote a long post to pay tribute to her:
Hello doctor, I’m here! These were the words I used every day to greet you when I walked into the clinic. We were always there. Me and you, you and me. You in the big room, Dad’s room. Me in the little room, the one that was yours until 2007, when Dad passed away at 62. 62 years old, the same age you turned a few days ago. But you were always the first to arrive, and the last to close the doors. ‘My patients are waiting for me’ you would say when you had to leave the house at 7am and my car was blocking your car in, while you were already on the phone with your first patient. Tireless, in the last 10 years I don’t think your clinic was closed for one day. Even with a broken foot. Yes, the clinic, after us, was your life.
Then on March 6th she said, “Rafi, I can’t breathe…”. The next day he accompanied her to the emergency room in Treviso and, as has happened to so many children during this pandemic, never saw her again. And before she ended up in intensive care, in her last WhatsApp message, his mother wrote to him: “Look after the clinic. You take care of it! Don’t tell anyone I’m here! I’ll be home soon!” But she never returned home because, after 33 days, Coronavirus took her away.
And now he is in the clinic, which has suddenly become too big, to take care of his patients. Alone, to face an unknown virus, saying on the phone: “We have lost a generation, our grandparents’ generation”. He is not referring to friends and family in Syria, where he went on holiday, but to those who died here, in his country. He is alone, watching this emergency in which if you feel ill, you are positive until proven otherwise and failing to understand the people who go to do the shopping every day because they haven’t grasped that there’s a national emergency. And there is no need to mention his dual citizenship, Italian and Syrian, at this time when, in addition to the clinic and the great emptiness left by his mother, he also thinks of the coincidences of his fate.
Of his father, who died on the first day of his internship, at the same age that his mother died, in the country that welcomed them and to which they also gave their lives. Dr. Rafi El Mazloum, coroner, the man who used his expertise in court to help acquit a nurse accused of killing a patient in hospital. A man who studied in Padua, where he also did his PhD and who had aspired to an academic career but now instead holds a surgery in the crowded, yet empty, clinic of Via Enrico Toti in Mira where he is putting into practice a lesson learned more from his mother than at university: in your sorrow, you are always alone.
Translated by Adam Clark
