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    A Doctor’s Journey: What I Learned About Women, Healing, and Myself in Eritrea
    A Doctor’s Journey: What I Learned About Women, Healing, and Myself in Eritrea
    A Doctor’s Journey: What I Learned About Women, Healing, and Myself in Eritrea
    Ebook55 pages46 minutes

    A Doctor’s Journey: What I Learned About Women, Healing, and Myself in Eritrea

    By Mary Lake Polan

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    About this ebook

    Dr. Mary Lake Polan takes us on a compelling journey into Eritrea, where she started a surgical clinic to offer life-changing care to African women. She and her team repair fistulas, a condition that results from traumatic births and leads many African women to lives of stigma and shame. Dr. Polan describes how she and her surgical team offered the care and compassion that forever changed the lives of their African patients, in a story that will inspire readers to believe that they, too, can make a difference.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherShe Writes Press
    Release dateOct 27, 2016
    ISBN9781940838861
    A Doctor’s Journey: What I Learned About Women, Healing, and Myself in Eritrea
    Author

    Mary Lake Polan

    Mary Lake Polan, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., served as the chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Stanford University School of Medicine from 1990 to 2006 and is currently a Clinical Professor, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Reproductive Medicine at Yale University School of Medicine. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Dr. Polan has a long-standing interest in women’s health research and has been actively involved in international public health. While at Stanford Medical School, she initiated The Eritrean Women’s Project in 2001 and has maintained this surgical project in Eritrea to repair fistulas resulting from traumatic births.

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      Book preview

      A Doctor’s Journey - Mary Lake Polan

      titlepage.png

      Copyright

      Collection copyright: The rights to all stories are owned by their respective authors and may not be used in any way without the authors’ expressed written permission.

      A Doctor’s Journey: What I learned about women, healing, and myself in Eritrea Copyright © 2016 by Mary Lake Polan

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

      Shebooks

      3060 Independence Avenue

      Bronx, NY 10463

      Visit our website at www.Shebooks.net

      Shebooks is a trademark of First Persona, LLC.

      Book design: Laura Morris Designs

      ISBN: 978-1-940838-85-4

      First Edition: September 2016

      Dedication

      This book is dedicated to Saleh Meki, a friend and the visionary Minister of Health of Eritrea who made this project possible and to the women of Eritrea who trusted us to help them.

      A Doctor’s Journey

      This is a story about friendship, a friendship that grew slowly and over years, between very different people – Stanford physicians from the United States and the doctors and nurses in the small African country of Eritrea.  It all began on a winter’s night in 2002.

      After the plane had hopscotched from San Francisco to Frankfurt to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the pilot’s announcement--We’re descending for our landing in Asmara--was an electric jolt waking me from the intermittent dozing of the twenty-four-hour trip.  Deprived of sleep, hair uncombed, I tried unsuccessfully to separate excitement from anxiety.

      The airplane door swung inward.  Freezing night air washed over me.  In my Out of Africa-influenced imagination, it should have been hot, but on this January night, I shivered in my cotton jacket as we descended the roll-up staircase onto a cracked concrete runway. ASMARA AIRPORT read the sign on the wall of a two-story building a couple of hundred yards away, visible in the yellow glow from the airport windows.

      I’d been dreaming of this moment for a long time. This trip was the goal I had worked toward over the last two years, ever since the idea of bringing American surgeons to treat women injured in childbirth became the focus of my sabbatical studies in international public health. I was then Chair of the Ob-Gyn department at Stanford University, and I had became fascinated by the problem of obstetric fistula – a terrible situation caused by prolonged labor which left a woman with a stillborn baby and constantly leaking urine from a hole torn in her bladder.

      Five American gynecologists, including me, were here because of my efforts. After months of work and planning, I had finally persuaded two foundations to support this two-week trip to Eritrea.  Recruiting the surgeons hadn’t been difficult. Everyone wanted to come and operate in Africa. Much harder had been gathering the necessary supplies.  We had to beg our sales reps for surgical supplies, antibiotics and sutures.  Then came the hours organizing and packing everything. Arranging care for my kids and coverage for my patients was next. All that effort was focused on these two weeks.

      More than half of Eritrea’s population is nomadic pastoralists who roam the rocky highlands as their goats, cattle, and camels forage for grass and search for water. Traditionally, when these women give birth, they labor in their tents or huts without the help of a trained midwife or physician. Many women marry in their early teens. They are poorly nourished, with immature, small pelvic bones. When they give birth, the outcome is often devastating: The mothers suffer severe injuries to their reproductive organs, and the babies die. I knew all this, had learned it in school at Berkeley, but now I would see and touch these women. We believed in our goals but I still worried: Could we really return these

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