Happy birthday Bu!

My little sister Abigail turned nineteen yesterday. Nineteen. I can hardly believe it. I was almost ten years old when she was born so she has always been my baby sister. But a few months ago she finished up her first year in college as a pre-med student. And we were honored that she spent her first summer break with us in North Africa. Honestly, I don’t think there is a single other person in the world that could have lived with us for two months without either driving us crazy in the end, or, as is far more likely, gone stark raving mad themselves. As it turns out, Abigail did neither. She was an enormous help to me as a new mother, arriving at about the height or my new parent psychosis, and yet never once mocking my bipolar tendency to bemoan my daughter’s stubborn refusal to sleep followed immediately by my supreme gloating over her absolute perfection in every way, repeated three or four times in the course of an hour. She was the perfect nanny-aunt spending hours bouncing Annabelle while I cooked, or feeding her while I studied language. She was a fabulous sister, listening to me pour out the two years of backlogged thoughts and emotions that come with sisterlessness. She slept in a leaking mud hut with a hedgehog for a roommate and listened patiently while we negotiated her bride price with our good friend Ahmed. She ate sorghum and okra, covered her head and learned to ride a motorcycle. She gracefully received advice about where to hide if planes started dropping bombs and didn’t panic when she learned that the hospital where she was working would be a likely target. She took in everything with delight, curiosity, amusement and amazement and made me see my world through her eyes all over again too.

I asked Abigail to make a guest appearance on my blog and write about her experience shadowing the one doctor at the local hospital, but, sadly, she declined. I wish she would have though because I think her firsthand account of the things she saw at that hospital needs to be told to as wide an audience as possible. She would come home every day from her time there with the most outrageous stories (and pictures!) of the surgeries she had watched, the pregnant tummies she had palpated and the diseases she had seen firsthand. She saw a woman whose foot had been blown off when she dropped a heavy load of firewood on a landmine. She watched an abdominal surgery on a conscious two-week old baby. She scrubbed up and stood inches away from dozens of hemorrhoid, goiter and hydrocele surgeries (if you don’t know what that last one is, look it up. I promise it’s worth your time) and every day she came home more and more interested in what she was seeing and hearing and learning.

The most touching story Abigail told me was of the day she spent in the maternity ward. Two women were in labor simultaneously and the room was crowded with family members, traditional midwives and hospital staff. Abigail was asked to take her shoes off before she entered the dim room and place them next to the pile of muddy sandals. She hedged around the splatters of blood on the floor but stepped in something she said looked like porridge; she prayed it was. One woman was having a difficult breech delivery and the doctor had been called in to help. He was sitting on a stool, straining to twist and pull the two tiny limp legs that hung outside her body. Despite the midwives scolding her to be quiet, the woman writhed in pain and at one point, reached out and clung to Abigail’s hand while she stood by and watched helplessly. Abigail said the breech delivery was so horrifically fascinating that she hardly noticed the woman behind her, silently laboring to deliver her own child. Both babies were eventually pulled and pushed into the world and both were immediately rushed to a table for intensive care.  With some oxygen and stimulation the breech baby survived and was returned to his mother to nurse. The second baby however, died shortly his birth, despite everything that could be done under the circumstances. Abigail said the young mother received the news without response. Neither bereaved nor stoic, she accepted the news with an air of nonchalance. “I seemed more upset than she did,” Abigail said. And we wondered how many times a day that story is repeated in that little hospital.

I was amazed by Abigail this summer. After sitting through my first hydrocele surgery I would have been sending in my applications for law school as fast I could. And watching a mother receive news that her baby has just died while she sits in her bodily fluids next to a woman cradling her squalling new child…well, I’m not sure how I would have handled that. But Abigail handled it all, with strength and empathy. And after this summer, she’s no longer just interested in becoming a doctor, but now, maybe a surgeon. In a place where there are landmines. In a hospital with no running water or electricity. And I can’t help but think, Great. What have we done? The thought of my baby sister working in a hospital in some war-torn country makes my stomach turn, but honestly, it’s with both fear and pride. I am so grateful for the time we got to spend with Abigail this summer. I could write fourteen posts about the things we did together and remembered together and what they made me think about. But on her birthday I just wanted to say how thankful I am for Abigail, how proud I am to be her big sister and how much we miss you already. Thank goodness you have three more summers before med school. (: Happy birthday, Bu.     

Showing Bryan photos from a hydrocele surgery (you know you're curious...)