Why one Muslim woman is crying in her car
Sometimes my job is like watching a horror film unfold in slow motion, a film in which I already know the ending.
Recently, I was taking care of a five-week-old infant who had been admitted to my hospital for meningitis, an infection in the fluid surrounding the brain. She had to be intubated upon arrival and became extremely sick. In time, it became clear to me that her brain had suffered a lot of damage, and I had to initiate a heart-breaking conversation with her mom, telling her that I was not sure her baby would ever walk, talk or hear.
Sometimes parents are so overwhelmed by shock that they don’t understand, but this mother asked: “Will my baby be able to see?” She understood. I am sure she had noticed how we had been checking her baby’s eyes. “Pupils fixed and dilated.” These are ominous words in the medical world.
I answered quietly, “I don’t know.”
I knew my eyes were welling up with tears, so I had to finish this conversation soon or the floodgates would open. But I always like to leave the family with something hopeful. So I said, “Every child is different in how they recover from these things and it’s up to you to help your baby to live up to her fullest potential.”
When I finally got home that evening, the first thing I did was log into the hospital’s computer system and read the baby’s brain MRI results. Then I cried for the next half hour. Uncontrollable crying.
I am a pediatric infectious diseases specialist. I relish the fact that in most cases when I discharge a patient I can tell them and their parents that their body is now infection-free. But on rare occasions, I don’t get to say that. So today, as I was again driving home, still thinking about this family, tears streamed down my face. Sometimes bad things happen to my patients and it affects me.
What is new now, though, all of a sudden, is that I am also fully aware of being a visibly Muslim woman, my hair covered with a scarf, crying my head off in my car. I am crying for a reason most human beings would completely un- derstand, but I cannot focus fully on healing my broken heart— not in the current political climate. I keep having this fleeting, distracting thought. Does the lady in the car next to me think I am contemplating something horrendous?
I try to shut out such thoughts. I am just sad for this baby. But still I wonder. Does the lady in the next car indeed hate me? And if her baby were hospitalized, would she still hate me if she knew me? Would she still dislike me based on my religion? Would she want me deported because I am the daughter of a Syrian refugee?
Of course I don’t know what she was thinking. But I know what Donald Trump and people like him are thinking, and I can’t help but wonder if this is what other Americans are thinking.
I don’t have to prove myself to anybody. I know this. But today, right now, I am hurt that I can’t just focus on my broken heart. I am hurt that I can’t just cry, pure and simply, for a baby.
And I am hurt that fellow Americans judge me for actions I abhor and which have no reflection on me.