Meet Pakistan’s US-trained female neurosurgeon
Sep 15, 2016
Dr. Aneela Darbar is a 1996 graduate of Dow Medical College.
She quotes The Beatles, loves the opera, looks like a supermodel, and has mastered God’s most intricate and creative machinery – the human brain.Aneela Darbar is currently the only US-trained female neurosurgeon in Pakistan. She specializes in minimally invasive endoscopic surgery and has worked as the Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at St. Louis University Hospital in Missouri before returning to Karachi four years ago.Her regular day begins at 5 am on her bike cycling through the streets of Karachi, followed by an hour of meditation, and then ends at Aga Khan University Hospital where she is a practicing neurosurgeon and a professor currently mentoring four bright young Pakistani women entering the field of neurosurgery.
Neurosurgery has an unbelievably minuscule number of women in it, especially women of colour, and the severely imbalanced ratios between females to males neurosurgeons, even in the United States, would astound you. In 2011, women made up only 7 per cent of board-certified neurosurgeons in the United States. The statistic hasn’t improved significantly since then.
Aneela dubs neurosurgery as a purely “white man’s club”, which she has crashed into despite all the warnings of it being “impossible” by all her local and international medical peers. But this audacious gatecrashing took many years of studying, researching, practicing, incredible amounts of devotion to this field, personal sacrifices and lots of plain old hard work.
“I still hear the phrase ‘kia aurat se surgery kerain gay?’ by some shocked patients and their families here,” she laughs. Patients feel comfortable being operated on by a bald, serious looking, 50-year-old man wearing spectacles. When Aneela enters the room, patients often find it hard to take her seriously. “I am a woman; I love handbags, wearing makeup and pretty clothes, I will not change into a man just to be taken seriously, I fully embrace my femininity.”
“I tell females who want to enter this field that they should be ‘rightfully scared’. This is by far one of the most emotionally and physically taxing occupations in the world,” she says. Of course, standing in surgery for over 12 to 14 hours can be taxing on any person. But its when her patients elevate her to the status of God that she finds most difficult. “The pendulum swings for us daily, we go from Gods to nothing in a matter of seconds, we have no space to falter,” she says.
Listening to Aneela’s story makes me truly believe that God chooses careers for us and not the other way around. For instance, when little girls were playing with Barbies, Aneela was constructing the brain with her Play-Doh. Growing up she had no doctors or neurosurgeons in her family, or TV shows or films which could have inspired this trajectory. The fact that she was so sure from such an early age that she wanted to be nothing but a neurosurgeon is quite a random occurrence/thought in a little Pakistani girl’s mind. “I burnt all my boats to pursue neurosurgery, I kept no other career options for myself,” she says.
Her first run-in with a neurosurgeon was at the age of 20 when she took her grandmother to one after she suffered a stroke. When Aneela revealed she would like to become a neurosurgeon herself, the old man told her it was “impossible”. She came home and cried for days. This was the very first time someone had told her to stick by society’s prescribed gender roles.
But the man who comforted her at the time was her father, a business man, who encouraged his daughter at every step. Her mother had passed away when she was a child.
She left Pakistan a year after that incident for the United States and spent the next 15 years turning around that ‘impossible’ to ‘possible’. Once she gained enough experience, she came back to Pakistan to start her practice in Karachi from scratch. “No one knew me here and I had no patients whatsoever. Doctors in Pakistan are recommended by word-of-mouth and I had none to start with.”
But gaining patients wasn’t her only struggle, she had to relearn living and working in Pakistan. “My old friends from Pakistan were all scattered around the world. Work ethics in Pakistan were very different from that of the US. People had no faith in the system and therefore placed little trust in medical professionals.”
Despite those struggles, being back in Karachi after so long, still felt like home to her. “There’s this undeniable bond with your country, its people and the language. It never dies and it keeps pulling you back,” says Aneela.
When asked her opinion on the rising trend of female medical students in Pakistan giving up their careers for marriage, she says, “I don’t think education is ever a waste. Those seats taken up are not wasted at all. The female candidates get them through merit and it is their choice whether they want to marry or pursue their careers later on. These girls get exposure, become educated, and can go on to raise good families. They can even pick up the trade years later.”
One of the struggles she faces both in Pakistan and abroad is that whenever she points out how her profession is deeply discriminatory towards women, she is told that she is utilizing the “victim/woman” card. “One thing I’ve learnt is to pick my battles wisely and which ones to let go,” she says.
Her advice for young women in Pakistan is to build plenty of ‘resilience’. “Build your career around your life and not the other way around. I was often so goal-oriented that I developed tunnel vision,” she says reminiscing just a little.
In a few weeks’ time, this busy neurosurgeon will head to Zanzibar to work with an NGO that provides children with neurological treatment free of charge. She’s also been chosen by 3 different mentors to be part of this year’s Pond’s Miracle Women in Pakistan and has played a pivotal role in the Fair & Lovely Foundation that provides financial support to talented Pakistani women.
We’re often told that doctors are supposed to be cold and indifferent. That’s what makes them good at their jobs, right?
But seeing how honest, and vulnerable Aneela is, throughout our conversation, makes me realize that the best doctors in the world are probably those who despite their difficult occupations stay emotionally open, and still not let those wide-open hearts get the best of them.
“I still cry when I have to relay bad news to a family member, I still struggle when we lose a patient,” says Aneela almost tearing up but holding her composure throughout our interview.
