382: What if you spent four months as a doctor in Gaza?
This Is Actually Happening
Wondery
4.6 • 9.9K Ratings
🗓️ 4 November 2025
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A humanitarian aid doctor enters Gaza at the height of the conflict, and emerges with a sobering reality that shatters everything he believed about medicine, morality, and human nature.
Today’s episode featured Travis Meleen. If you’d like to email Travis, you can reach him at [email protected], You can also find him on Instagram @ravenilem
Travis is available for sharing his experiences in a speaking engagement setting. Please reach out to him for more information and/or to schedule!
Producers: Whit Missildine, Andrew Waits, Aviva Lipkowitz
Content/Trigger Warnings: War and armed conflict, Mass casualties and graphic medical trauma, Violence against children / child death, Gun violence, Hospital bombings / attacks on medical facilities, Famine, Starvation, and Medical scarcity, Death and grief, Suicide (partner’s death by suicide, mentioned), PTSD, Moral injury, and Psychological distress, Dehumanization, Propaganda, and references to Genocide, explicit language
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to exclusive episodes of This Is Actually Happening |
| 0:05.0 | by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. |
| 0:09.6 | This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. |
| 0:13.9 | Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode |
| 0:17.0 | and for more information about support services. |
| 0:33.4 | All of a sudden, this super intense bombing starts happening, very close, you know, well within a block of the hospital, and kind of felt like we froze in place, you know, took a step to our left, a step to our |
| 0:41.0 | right, step forward, like, trying to figure out, like, where do you go that's safe in this |
| 0:45.7 | scenario? |
| 0:46.7 | And, you know, within a few seconds, you're like, oh, there is nowhere that's safe. |
| 1:00.4 | From Wondery, I'm Whit Mistledine. |
| 1:03.9 | You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. |
| 1:10.2 | Episode 382. |
| 1:15.0 | What if you spent four months as a doctor in Gaza? |
| 1:25.3 | Hey, pod listeners, have we got a fun new game for you? |
| 1:26.7 | It's called Quick, Quick, Quick, Quick, |
| 1:46.3 | a game that has outrageous questions that will keep you playing and laughing for hours. Like this, Quick, Quick, Quick, list three gifts you'd never give a cowboy. And you can say anything. There's no wrong answers. So go get it, quick, quick, quickly. Available now at Target and Amazon. Fleeing persecution, A small band of Pilgrim set sail across the Atlantic, |
| 1:49.1 | risking everything to start again in the new world. |
| 1:54.0 | But behind that story lies another one of conflict, betrayal, and brutal violence against the very people who help them survive. |
| 1:56.6 | Listen to American history tellers on the Wonder Y app, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 2:22.0 | Music Listen to American history tellers on the Wonder app or wherever you get your podcasts. So my parents initially met somewhere in Palestine. |
| 2:24.1 | I'm not actually sure exactly where. |
| 2:28.6 | My dad is from northern Wisconsin, and my mom is from Holland. |
... |
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