‘Chasing Zebras’
Memoir by Dr. Margaret Nowaczyk details an extraordinary life in medicine and her battle with mental illness
There’s an old medical school adage: “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.” In diagnostic terms, it means don’t go chasing after some exotic disease (a zebra) when the symptoms point to something more common (a horse).
Dr. Margaret Nowaczyk, however, has been chasing zebras her entire career. Nowaczyk is a pediatric clinical geneticist and professor at McMaster University and the DeGroote School of Medicine in Hamilton.
Her specialty is diagnosing, sometimes prenatal, and caring for children with genetic disorders, sometimes very rare ones, as well as providing counselling for the parents of her patients.
It’s a fascinating field of medicine. In some ways, Nowaczyk is a reallife version of Dr. House, the TV medical detective played by actor Hugh Laurie who always seems to diagnose the undiagnosable. (More on Nowaczyk’s opinion of the fictional Dr. House later).
Nowaczyk is also a very talented, award-winning author, with a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of British Columbia.
You can find out just how good a writer she is by reading her new book, “Chasing Zebras, A Memoir of Genetics, Mental Health and Writing,” recently released by Hamilton publisher Wolsak & Wynn.
“Chasing Zebras” tells the story of an extraordinary life that begins in Poland. Her family fled from the Communist regime when Nowaczyk was in high school. They spent a few months in an Austrian refugee camp before emigrating to Toronto.
Nowaczyk arrived in Canada in 1981 with only a rudimentary knowledge of the English language. She quickly fit in, changing her given name from the Polish Malgorzata, which few of her classmates or teachers could pronounce, to Margaret.
Her drive for perfection became obsessive. She needed to be the best at everything, especially in school where she excelled, gaining acceptance to the University of Toronto for undergraduate studies and then into the university’s medical school, the best in the country. Her goal was to become a clinical geneticist at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children.
But, there was always something holding her back. In Grade 13, Nowaczyk went through “a funny spell” for several weeks where she lost all drive, ambition and interest in school. The “funny spell” affected her grades, good enough to gain acceptance at university, but not good enough to gain scholarship offers.
There would be other “funny spells” of depression through her 15 years of post-secondary education, sometimes followed by periods of manic hyperactivity. She didn’t get a permanent position at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, the job she always wanted, but in 1997 she did land a job as clinical geneticist at McMaster where her husband, Jimm, also worked as a medical internist.
At McMaster, Nowaczyk’s career took off. She gained an international reputation, as a geneticist, authoring 120 peer-reviewed papers for genetic publications and being appointed professor in 2014.
Nowaczyk, her husband and two sons, settled into a home in west Hamilton, near the McMaster campus. She grew to love the city, but her battle with mental illness continued, at times disrupting her family life. Things came to a crisis and Nowaczyk was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder. There was medication and, eventually, five weeks of hospitalization.
“I have never been ashamed of it,” Nowaczyk says in an interview. “It’s just part of me. I consider it a completely biological thing. Actually, having the diagnosis made me feel better.”
At the hospital, she was advised to come to terms with her thoughts and emotions through journaling. She had always loved the printed word and now she was using it as reflective therapy. She enrolled in a creative-writing class at McMaster and found herself revelling in the art of story-telling.
“You can help yourself by becoming vulnerable on the page and once you accept your vulnerability, it is so much easier to ask for help, which is what happened to me,” she says.
While continuing her work at
McMaster, she wrote two guidebooks on genealogy and medical family tree analysis. They became bestsellers in her native Poland. As well, her writing appeared in literary journals such as Geist, The New Quarterly Review, Prairie Fire and The Antigonish Review and several medical literary magazines in the United States and Poland.
Nowaczyk also became an advocate of narrative medicine, a practice that encourages doctors to write case notes in everyday language to help them better understand their patients and their illnesses.
Somehow, Nowaczyk also found the time to study for her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. She considered writing fiction for her thesis, but discovered that her instructors and fellow students found her stories of her work fascinating. She decided to write a memoir instead.
The result is “Chasing Zebras,” which also happens to be a term used by the fictional Dr. House in the popular TV show.
And what does the real Dr. Nowaczyk think of the fictional Dr. House?
“I hated that show,” she says. “It was so unrealistic. A person like him would never be allowed to practice medicine, even 15 years ago when that show was on. He was brutal, inappropriate and unprofessional, beside the fact that he was a drug addict.”