I Hear a Song In My Head: A Memoir In Stories of Love, Fear, Doctoring, and Flight

Boone's Tejani Nergesh

Description

Set in Uganda of the sixties with bookends in India and New York, this doctors story tells of a turbulent political time when colonial Uganda graduated to self-rule. It is also the personal story of an Indian woman living in an independent African country wanting and needing assimilation but regretfully recognizing rejection. It is the story of the exhilaration of living in a country more beautiful than Eden, if sometimes a threatened Eden. But most of all it tells doctoring tales made delicate by seeing them through the heart. It was a time in medicine before evidential imperatives removed the romance.Dr. Tejanis unique meld of skill and compassion radiates throughout this text which will touch both physician and lay readers alike. Frank A. Chervenak, M.D., New York Weill Cornell Medical Center.With clarity, drama, and humor, this book creates a family story, a picture of an African nation in the throes of political upheaval, and an original and illuminating view of medical needs and practices in circumstances that exist today in many parts of the world. The complex harmonies of the song in Dr. Tejanis head will resonate for a wide variety of readers.Carol Sicherman, Professor Emerita of English, City University of New York, and author of Becoming an African University: Makerere 1922-2000.Nergesh Tejani is a terrific writer... Her stories are compelling and I think will be of great interest to the general reader and the medical reader alike. Her subject is often exotic, often with international themes and full of pithy observations and wisdom.Abraham Verghese, M.D., Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine, Stanford University Medical Center.

Sujets

• Love
• Love (disambiguation)
• Médecine

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 21 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780985569846
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Set in Uganda of the sixties with bookends in India and New York, this doctor’s story tells of a turbulent political time when colonial Uganda graduated to self-rule. But most of all it tells doctoring tales made delicate by seeing them through the heart. It was a time in medicine before evidential imperatives removed the romance.
 
“With clarity, drama, and humor, this book creates a family story, a picture of an African nation in the throes of political upheaval, and an original and illuminating view of medical needs and practices in circumstances that exist today in many parts of the world. The complex harmonies of the song in Dr. Tejani’s head will resonate for a wide variety of readers.”—Carol Sicherman, Professor Emerita of English, Lehman College, City University of New York, and author of Becoming an African University: Makerere 1922-2000 .
 
“Dr. Tejani’s unique meld of skill and compassion radiates throughout this text which will touch both physician and lay readers alike. This book is an important contribution to world literature.” —Frank A. Chervenak, M.D., Given Foundation Professor and Chairman President of the World Association of Perinatal Medicine, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, New York Weill Cornell Medical Center.
 
“Nergesh Tejani is a terrific writer. Her work has inspired some of the scenes in my book Cutting for Stone . Her stories are compelling and would be of great interest to the general reader and the medical reader alike. Her subject is often exotic, often with international themes and full of pithy observations and wisdom.”—Abraham Verghese,Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine, Senior Associate Chair, Department of Medicine, Stanford University Medical Center.
 
Nergesh Tejani is Professor Emerita of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the New York Medical College and Professor of Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.After medical school in India, she married a Ugandan colleague and moved to Kampala, where she spent the next eleven years of her life. She and her family moved to New York, where she sub-specialized in maternal-fetal medicine. She spent the next three decades in academic obstetrics and gynecology. She presently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
 


 
I Hear a Song
in My Head
 
A Memoir in Stories of Love, Fear, Doctoring, and Flight
 
Nergesh Tejani, M.D.
 
 

Washington, DC
 


Copyright © 2012 by Nergesh Tejani
 
New Academia Publishing, 2012
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system.
 
Published in eBook format by SCARITH/New Academia Publishing
Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-0-9855-6984-6
 
 
An imprint of New Academia Publishing
 
New Academia Publishing
PO Box 27420, Washington, DC 20038-7420
[e-mail]
www.newacademia.com
 


 
To all my beloveds
 
 
Reproduced with permission:
Tejani, Nergesh. Gentle Hands Lancet 1997; 349 (Issue 9064): 1562.
Tejani, Nergesh. Unspeakable Deeds Obstet Gynecol 2008; 111:187-188.
Tejani, Nergesh. Fistula Obstet Gynecol 2000; 96 1009-1010.
Acknowledgements
 
After my husband, Amir, died, the only times that I spent in relative peace were when I was asleep or writing of him. I chose to write about the most event-filled and exciting time of my life—the eleven years we spent in Kampala, Uganda, East Africa. This might be the only positive thing that was born as a result of his death—a celebration of those African years.
 
My thanks to Emily Pechefsky, that rigorous English scholar with whom I share two grandchildren. She read my writings with an unflinching eye and honest, sometimes ruthless, critiques. And in her acerbic manner, she convinced me that I had a voice that others may care to hear. And to Carol Sicherman who painstakingly edited my meandering thoughts. My thanks to Karen Getchell who carefully picked up after me.
 
And I thank Gareth Barberton, my co-trainee in Kampala and my companion in the London months. He asked, cajoled, commanded me to write of my life. And to do it fast or he may not be around to read the story.
 
Prologue
The White Coat
The date was December 19 th , 1969. Late one velvet African night we returned home after an evening with friends at the Leopard’s Lair—a Western-style nightclub with local spirit. The friends we had been with called later that night, telling us that Prime Minister Obote had been shot and injured. He was attending a political rally close to our home and someone, suspected to be a dispossessed Muganda, had tried to assassinate him. The bullet had gone through his jaw, and he had been taken to Mulago Hospital.
Next morning, I got a call from the small hospital where I worked. Mrs. Patel was in labor. She had regular contractions, reassuring fetal heart tones and was five centimeters dilated. I’m coming…I’m coming.
Got my six-year-old Rushna ready for school, took my three-year-old Cena across the road to nursery school and fed my one-year-old Sharyn. Combining work with being a mother was now natural and smooth.
I donned my white doctor’s coat and took off in my sportsy Triumph, forgetting the events of the night before. The road to the hospital went past Mulago Hospital. I was stopped at a road block near the hospital by a clattering army presence. ‘Out of your cars and open the trunk,’ was the bark. Out of the car was fine, but I knew the trunk of my car did not open. A smallish knot formed in my upper abdomen.
An Indian couple climbed out of the van in front of me —a man and his diminutive wife, I assumed. Approaching them, bayonet poised, was an oversized human in polished boots and starched khakis.
‘We were searched before,’ whispered the woman in Swahili.
The man in the boots turned on her. She was no higher than his armpit. The handle of his bayonet cracked across her head and she lay quietly across the road. Her husband raised both his arms in a sign of surrender. A frozen scene before me—a raised lethal weapon, a tiny woman on the ground and her protector, pale and speechless.
I turned away. There was no question of helping. Also, ‘boots’ was walking toward me. I had a sickening remembrance of the unopenable trunk.
He took in my white coat.
‘Good morning, doctor,’ he said in Sandhurst inflections. ‘I won’t hold you up. Have a nice day.’
With a mechanical smile on my face, I fumbled into the car. I glanced at the savaged couple. The man was carrying his wife into the van.
Again I turned away. My powerful white coat could not help this hurt.
I arrived at my hospital. Was I the same person as before? To witness violence has to cause some shift in humors. To witness violence and not react—that must increase choler. To witness violence, rely on the protection of the white coat, the healer’s symbol, and not react—a cult of barbarism.
I walked into Mrs. Patel’s room. She was fully dilated and pushing. Relentless labor cares nothing for politics. Cares nothing for the wounded prime minister at Mulago Hospital shot by those he had excluded from power. Cares nothing for a slight woman felled in savagery.
I changed into scrubs, smiled. I let others exhort her to push... push. I could wait.
I waited for the scene of horror to pass. I am still waiting. Was the husband forever diminished in her eyes? Did she notice the woman in the white coat who made no move to help her? Did she go home and continue—prepare a meal, tend to her children, go to work? Did she start to fear a recalcitrant houseboy? Did her mind make preparations to leave the country, probably of her birth?
I see a little peep of scalp. Push, oh, push, that timeless chant. Jor karo...sindika...empuja . Words for the universally useful ‘push’ in many languages.
More dark hair asserted itself even between contractions. Mrs. Patel and family needed to know the exact time when the widest diameter of the head was delivered. The child’s horoscope would be based on star relationships at that time. It is not the birth of the heart or gut but the brain that is crucial to this little one’s future. A responsibility not taught in obstetric textbooks, noting the time of crowning of the head. Well, here it was. A dark wet head crowned by a halo of stretched maternal tissue. Crowned by its mother.
The baby girl slithered out. Pink and reactive. The family outside were silent when informed. Too well bred to be openly sad for yet another girl.
One said consolingly, ‘ Laxmi’ —‘Wealth’.
There were tears in the new mother’s eyes but she gathered her wiped baby to her breast and closed her eyes.
I changed back to street clothes, donned my white coat and reentered a changed world.
 
As things wind down for me, I look back on all the stories I was privileged to be part of. Some of the passport one gets when there is an M.D. tacked onto your name whether in New York or Uganda. Stories worth telling.
My story starts at the end of my Obstetrics and Gynecology registrarship in Bombay, India, where I lived, went to medical school and married and covers the eleven years we lived in Uganda, East Africa, and our first year in the U.S. I included this last year because at the end of it, Idi Amin, who ‘reigned’ in Uganda after a military coup, had a dream in which he was commanded to banish the Asian population of Uganda. This dream and order was announced on August 9 th , 1972, with a deadline for leaving three months later on November 9 th . In October and the first week of November 1972, our extended family arrived in bits and pieces on the shores of North America, to be welcomed by us who had arrived here by chance, whim and luck the year before.
 
ONE
Amir
To understand my life I have to tell you about him. In brief, in short, in staccato. Our beginning