She quotes The Beatles, loves the opera, 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 was Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at St. Louis University Hospital in Missouri before returning to Karachi four years ago.
Her day begins at 5 am on her bike, cycling through the streets of Karachi, then an hour of meditation, and ends at Aga Khan University Hospital, where she practises, teaches, and is currently mentoring four young Pakistani women into neurosurgery.
Neurosurgery has an unbelievably small number of women in it, especially women of colour. In 2011, women made up seven per cent of board-certified neurosurgeons in the United States. The number hasn’t moved much since.
Aneela calls neurosurgery “a white man’s club” — one she crashed despite being told it was impossible by medical peers at home and abroad. The gatecrashing took years of studying, researching, practising, personal sacrifice and plain hard work.
“I still hear the phrase ‘kia aurat se surgery kerain gay?’ from some shocked patients and their families here,” she laughs. Will a woman do the surgery? Patients are comfortable being operated on by a bald, serious-looking fifty-year-old man in spectacles. When Aneela walks in, they 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 tell women 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.” Twelve to fourteen hours standing in surgery would tax anyone. What she finds hardest is being made into a god. “The pendulum swings for us daily. We go from Gods to nothing in a matter of seconds. We have no space to falter.”
As a child, while other girls played with Barbies, Aneela built brains out of Play-Doh. There were no doctors in her family, no neurosurgeons, no television shows to put the idea there. It is a random thing to find in a little Pakistani girl’s head, and she never let it go. “I burnt all my boats to pursue neurosurgery. I kept no other career options for myself.”
Her first encounter with a neurosurgeon was at twenty, when she took her grandmother to one after a stroke. When Aneela said she wanted to become one herself, the old man told her it was impossible. She came home heartbroken. It was the first time anyone had told her to stay inside the role society had prescribed for her.
The person who comforted her was her father, a businessman, who backed her at every step.
She left Pakistan for the United States a year later and spent the next fifteen years turning that impossible around. When she had enough experience, she came back to Karachi and started 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.”
Patients weren’t the only thing she had to rebuild. “My old friends from Pakistan were all scattered around the world. Work ethics here were very different from the US. People had no faith in the system, and therefore placed little trust in medical professionals.”
Still, it felt like home. “There’s this undeniable bond with your country, its people and the language. It never dies, and it keeps pulling you back.”
On the rising number of Pakistani women who finish medical school and give up the career for marriage, she is unbothered. “I don’t think education is ever a waste. Those seats are not wasted at all. The female candidates get them through merit, and it is their choice whether they marry or pursue their careers later. They can even pick up the trade years later.”
One fight follows her everywhere. Whenever she points out how discriminatory her profession is towards women, in Pakistan or abroad, she is told she is playing the woman card. “One thing I’ve learnt is to pick my battles wisely, and which ones to let go.”
Her advice for young women in Pakistan is resilience — and one correction of her own. “Build your career around your life and not the other way around. I was often so goal-oriented that I developed tunnel vision.”
In a few weeks she will be in Zanzibar, working with an NGO that treats children with neurological conditions free of charge.
We’re told doctors are supposed to be cold and indifferent. That’s what makes them good at the job, right? Watching Aneela stay honest and open through the whole conversation, I realise the best doctors are probably the ones who, despite the work, keep their hearts wide open — and don’t let those open hearts get the best of them.
“I still cry when I have to relay bad news to a family. I still struggle when we lose a patient,” she says.