The Right Place at the Right Time Isn’t Enough: You Need the Right People

“Before Assuta Ashdod, a trip to the hospital for us meant going to a completely different city. If this had happened then, I don’t even want to know what would have been. Not only is Assuta Ashdod close to home, but the level of care they provided us shows how much they truly want the best for their patients.”

This past October, Tanya Shaulov, 37 weeks pregnant, was not overly concerned when she began having contractions one Thursday evening. After all, this would be Tanya and her husband, Avi’s, third baby. With one cesarean and one natural birth under their belts, these parents felt confident that they were prepared to handle the birth of their third.

When her contractions began, Avi took Tanya into Assuta Ashdod to get checked. After some routine tests, the doctors found no reason for alarm and sent them home, as happens often in early labor. However, the following night, Tanya’s contractions returned, stronger than they had been the day before. Just to be safe, Tanya and Avi decided to return to the hospital.

Avi recounts, “We arrived At Assuta Ashdod within ten minutes, since we’re local Ashdodi. After an additional confirmation that everything looked fine, we were about to be on our way back home when an additional wave of contractions hit Tanya. The first few were bearable, but the fourth was different. I later learned that Tanya felt something tear, but all I heard was her screaming in pain.” Avi ran to alert the doctors, who came immediately, but when they couldn’t find a heartbeat for the baby, chaos ensued. Tanya’s uterus had torn on the scar line from her past cesarean section and both her life and the baby’s were in danger.

“What felt like dozens of doctors rushed Tanya to the operating room so fast my head spun. I was terrified.”

To Avi, what felt like a lifetime of fear was suddenly over as quickly as it had begun. After seven minutes waiting outside the surgery suite as instructed, Avi held their healthy new baby in his arms. Thanks to the quick reactions of Dr. Alyssa Sadon and midwife Linoi Cohen-Gevura, Tanya was safe too.

“I consider myself an optimist,” Tanya says. “I believe everything happens for a reason and there was a reason we were at Assuta Ashdod when the tear occurred.”

Both Avi and Tanya believe God was watching over them that night, so they named their new daughter Nessya, miracle of God. It is certainly nothing short of a miracle that both Nessya and Tanya emerged from the emergency relatively unscathed. But they also attribute the success story to the doctors at Assuta Ashdod.

“Sometimes when people talk about medical miracles, they inevitably downplay the role of the doctors in the story. I don’t want to do that. I know it was an act of God that we were in the right place at the right time, but the doctors were the ones who jumped into action and saved us against all odds,” Tanya explains.

Nessya is now two months old and hitting all of her developmental milestones on time. Tanya remarks, knowingly, “The chances of the baby making it weren’t very high. Because of Assuta Ashdod, Nessya’s biggest problem is that her siblings won’t stop giving her so much love and attention. We have Assuta Ashdod to thank for that.”