The war in Gaza reunited two eminent plastic surgeons in March, one from Toronto who came to assist and train Israeli doctors in the difficult specialty of craniomaxillofacial cases (dealing with the head, neck and jaw), and the other a surgeon at one of Hadassah’s hospital in Jerusalem who trained under the Canadian doctor in Toronto.
Dr. Jeffrey Fialkov, head of plastic surgery at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, spent several weeks at Hadassah assisting surgeons there as they treated victims of the war who had sustained head injuries. His trainee is Dr. Allan Billig, a senior plastic surgeon at Hadassah, who worked under Dr. Fialkov three years ago in Toronto.
“The volume and complexity of cases has gone up, but the people fixing them has stayed the same,” due in part to physicians who have been called up by the military, Dr. Billag told the Canadian Jewish News. “These are not easy cases. To have Jeff by my side, even three years later, it’s a real gamechanger.”