The Broke Doctor

Broke as in broken or broke as in penniless? Both to be honest.

But the good news is that there is no addiction involved. No gambling. Just small missteps every now and then. And a weakness for positive thinking, while struggling to believe and internalise the positivity.

I have been a doctor for almost 23 years, I will be 50 this year. This is my true story.

It was a tumultuous, rocky start from day one - I was born by forceps on a Wednesday midday in the summer heat of 1970's North Africa. After a long labour and a difficult forceps delivery in the city hospital, my mothers' relief lasted less than twenty four hours - I had full blown septicaemia and my prognosis was not good. My mother was told that I was going to die within hours. Group B streptoccocus was the culprit - even today, babies die of this, not just in Africa, but all over the western world and its fancy hospitals. There was no penicillin in the hospital and besides that, I was so septic, all of my tiny veins had shut down, so the paediatricians couldn't get intravenous access. It was a hopeless case. So they gave up, before even trying. "No point!" they said, "we've seen this so many times". I was going to die, and they were not going to waste valuable resources on me.

My mother wasn't impressed. She sent my uncle across the city to look for penicillin in every pharmacy, and hobbled painfully to her tiny car and drove with my grandmother to the house of one of her professors - a paediatrician. Remember, this is North Africa in the 1970's - medical professionals knew each other on a personal level and professors hosted groups of their students in their homes many times, as a professional courtesy. My mother was distraught and banging on his door at midnight, screaming that he can not sleep while her baby was dying. He was the only one skilled enough to succeed at a venisection (cutting open the skin to get to a deep vein). So he came in his pyjamas and here I am. Obviously, my uncle had also come back with penicillin. The professor who saved my life told me this story when we bumped into him in Dubai many years later - I was a medical student at the time and he was delighted to see me looking so well, twenty something years later. He was apparently amused to see my mothe also looking so well, the student that had got him into the hospital at midnight, in his pyjamas.

After my narrow escape from an untimely septic death, I grew up drinking from the waters of the Nile and eating organic food from local markets for the first few years of my life. I was shuttled between my grandparents and parents for the first two years (I found this out recently, accidentally) My medical parents had to contribute to society by completing a government enforced rural internship, where conditions were too harsh to take an infant, so I was handed over to my maternal grandmother for safe keeping. My maternal grandparents and my maternal uncle provided the love and comfort an infant needs, and that love stayed with me throughout their lives, inexplicably, because I did not know about the events of those first few formative years for so long. I couldn't understand how I loved my grandmother more than my mother, despite barely seeing her for years on end after we immigrated to another land. I kept ties with my uncle as long as he was alive and couldn't bear to think that I would not see him for years on end, until he died. When my parents returned from their internship a year later and took me back to their care, I was two years old, and apart from crying for my grandparents and uncle, there was nothing I could do about it. I attached myself strongly to my father, a replacement for my uncle, who I loved so much.

My parents' marriage ended suddenly a year later, when my father went to work one morning and never returned home, voluntarily. He had organised a divorce and a new life for himself, rapidly exiting the country with his new wife within weeks. My mother was heavily pregnant with my sister and I was almost three. My second emotional displacement. This time, I was old enough to object properly, in the only way I could - I stopped eating and talking. My grandmother told me that I became so thin I had to be force fed. But all emotionally traumas eventually dissipate into our subconscious, and mine was no different.

My mother decided that it was time to find a new life in a new land, to wipe the slate clean and start over. My grandparents left their North African life and their only son, my uncle, behind and joined their daughter and her two small daughters, one aged three and the other only months old on a flight to another continent, with hope in their hearts that the pain and shame of a divorcee daughter, would be easier to bear in a land where none knew who we were.