Despite being a male-dominated and conservative society, Pakistan has managed to produce some prolific women in the field of science, medicine, engineering and technology including Oscar winning filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy and scientist Nargis Mavalvala. Doctor Aneela Darbar is certainly one of those the countrymen can be proud of.
Aneela Darbar is currently the only US-trained female neurosurgeon in Pakistan. She specializes in minimally invasive endoscopic surgery and has worked as the Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at St. Louis University Hospital in Missouri before returning to Karachi four years ago.
The percentage of women neurosurgery residents is less than that of women in general surgery. Despite advances in issues related to gender equity, barriers to recruiting and retaining women in neurosurgery continue to exist.
“I tell females 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,” she says. Of course, standing in surgery for over 12 to 14 hours can be taxing on any person. But it’s when her patients elevate her to the status of God that she finds most emotionally taxing. “The pendulum swings for us daily, we go from Gods to nothing in a matter of seconds, we have no space to falter,” she said in a recent interview.
The fact that she was so sure from such an early age that she wanted to be nothing but a neurosurgeon is quite a random occurrence/thought in a little Pakistani girl’s mind. "I burnt all my boats to pursue neurosurgery, I kept no other career options for myself," she says.
Her first run-in with a neurosurgeon was at the age of 20 when she took her grandmother to one after she suffered a stroke. When Aneela revealed she would like to become a neurosurgeon herself, the old man told her it was “impossible”. She came home and cried for days. This was the very first time someone had told her to stick by society’s prescribed gender roles.
Her regular day begins at 5 am on her bike cycling through the streets of Karachi, followed by an hour of meditation, and then ends at Agha Khan Hospital where she is a practicing neurosurgeon and a professor currently mentoring four bright young Pakistani women entering the field of neurosurgery.
–This article originally appeared here
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