After father flees Iraq, three sons save lives in U.S.
PHOENIX - The nurse’s station on the ninth floor of the hospital was a hushed hum of chit-chat on a busy October morning.
Pinned to a black bulletin board, next to a few greeting cards, was a white sheet of paper with a hand-drawn heart and a message from a patient. Warning signs hung on doors, marking rooms with people whose illness was contagious.
Moustapha Abidali, a third-year resident at Banner-University Medical Center Phoenix, checked a woman's chart and tried to remember tiny details about her life.
Her hair was matted, her hospital gown crinkled, but her lilac nail polish was chip-free and she was quick to flirt when Moustapha checked on her.
In this trauma-level 1 training hospital with honeycomb-shaped windows that block out the Arizona sunlight, patient-care rounds are filled with small packs of inquiring medical students. But not every doctor-in-training knows when it's better to just listen or how to turn up the charm.
Moustapha, born in Kuwait to parents who fled violence in Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s regime, grew up listening to family stories about healing wounds, saving lives and mourning death.
Patients call him Dr. Abidali, paying little attention to the distinction between a doctor and a resident. He is 31, stands more than six feet tall and rarely slouches. Moustapha has a way of talking about family and medicine as if the two are inseparable.
“I think about how I’d want my mom treated,” he said.
He also remembers his father’s stories about how his own family was treated.
Plenty of patients needed to be seen at the medical center, a sprawling city hospital, which, despite an official name change, remains better known to most longtime Phoenix residents as Good Samaritan.
But Moustapha didn't rush. He knew his patient with perfect nails and graying hair needed someone to do more than check on the beat of her heart and the rate of her pulse. He hid the depths of his sleep deprivation and waited with the woman.
“Want to come home with me … take care of me?” she said in a sing-song way, hinting at her playfulness and, maybe, at her loneliness.
Only when their conversation was easy, did Moustapha gently wrap his hand around her pale wrist and ask, in a voice layered with a hint of an accent, where she hurt.
“We consider Iraq our home country. We love Iraq with all of our hearts. (But) when my brother was killed, for speaking out against the political norms, our family knew that we could not stay there and live a secure life.”
Akram Abidali
He listened to his patient’s answers and her stories, treating each word as a guide. This is something he learned from his own father, who would tell him and his brothers stories about their past.
The five Abidali boys — four born outside of America, one born in the U.S. — were raised to know their uncle was murdered, their family imprisoned and persecuted and that fleeing Iraq in the late 1970s had meant leaving behind loved ones and living as refugees, as immigrants.
“We consider Iraq our home country. We love Iraq with all of our hearts,” said Moustapha's father, Akram, in an email. “(But) when my brother was killed, for speaking out against the political norms, our family knew that we could not stay there and live a secure life.”
From Iran to Lebanon to Syria, the Abidalis traveled. They sought political asylum in Canada, and later opportunity in America.
One day, many years later, the Abidalis would have a new story to tell. One about how a family could raise three sons to become American doctors and how all three would study at the same medical school and begin their work at the same desert hospital.
To read the rest of the story, click here:
For more stories like this, LIKE Humankind on Facebook.