Arieh Avni

“Be happy if he ends up a carpenter or an electrician”, said the medical director of Israel’s rehabilitation center, Loewenstein Hospital, to Arieh Avni’s mother in October of 1969. At the time, the senior doctor’s recommendation was quite reasonable. In May of that year, six weeks before finishing his 3-year military service, Avni suffered a head injury caused by several mortar shards during Israel’s War of Attrition. After one week, unconscious in the neurosurgical department, he was transferred to the Rehabilitation Center. The right side of his body was paralyzed. He lost the ability to read and write. As an injured soldier he was afforded the best treatment the center had to offer. In October he was summoned to medical school entrance exams, but the medical director of the Center refused to send him to Jerusalem to take the test. He can’t recall exactly what happened, but he must have banged on her table… gone to take the exam, and passed. Perhaps what was left of his brain was enough for medical studies. Avni specialized in surgery and interned as a gastroenterologist for three years in South Africa, Japan, and Israel. His first wife passed away in 1979, when he was 31. She was only 29. A year and a half earlier, he discovered the breast cancer she was afflicted with. That was before he began his surgical residency. She underwent surgery, radiations, and chemotherapy and was treated by the best oncologists. Avni was forced to bury the results of their work. He lost his sister, who was also treated by oncologists, to ovarian cancer in 2003. It was then that he began to cultivate an interest in health and chronic diseases, including cancer. Dr. Arieh Avni was born in Poland in 1948 and immigrated to Israel at age 9. He completed his high school studies in Be’er Sheva and volunteered for Israel’s Paratroopers Brigade in 1966. After rehabilitation, he studied for a medical degree in Jerusalem. Today, he is a father of five and grandfather of an ever-growing brood of grandchildren.