My Life as a Surgeon: Diary of a Refugee

By John Syriaco

Which complications can occur during and after surgeries? What are the challenges that a surgeon could face? The late war on Syria erupted, and he fled to Canada. What happened in Aleppo and other cities in Syria? It was a mini world war that never happened before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532034152

John Syriaco

John Syriaco was born in Aleppo, Syria. He graduated from the medical school, University of Heidelberg in Germany. As surgeon, he worked in Germany, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Later, he landed as refugee in Canada.

Book preview

Chapter One

EARLY CHILDHOOD

A leppo, which has more than 5000 years of history, is the city where I was born in Syria. My parents, grandparents and their grandparents were also born in this city. Christians have lived there for almost 2000 years.

Aleppo is situated in Northern Syria, 70 km from the Turkish border, about 150 km east of the Mediterranean Sea and about 370 km from the capital of Damascus.

At one time, 150 years ago, Christians represented over 25% of the population in Aleppo, and while Jews were a minority in the city, they were accepted by the majority who were Sunni Muslims. Nowadays, Christians comprise less than 10% of the population.

Waves of thousands of Christians left the city in the early part of the 20th century at the time of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when people were starving during the First World War. Later, during the French mandate in the years 1930-1935, several attempted genocides happened which also caused Christians to leave the city.

During this time, three of my uncles, brothers on my father’s side, left Aleppo to go to Argentina, Brazil and the United States. My father and his father never heard from them again.

What a coincidence that after almost one hundred years, I also had to leave my country due to a possible genocide coming to my city Aleppo. This time the thread was also from fanatic Sunni Muslims beheading and killing Christians and other Muslims, encouraged, financed and armed from regional and international superpowers. So my family is now spread in different countries: two sisters in Venezuela, another in the United States, one in Lebanon, one brother who went to a country village in Tartous, Syria, and who is still trying to come to Canada to join his son in Montreal and, finally, one sister in Belgium. I had to come to Canada to stay by my son who had been living there for several years. Later my younger son joined us too.

I wanted to write this story because I wanted to share my life and surgical experience with everyone.

I lived as a general surgeon in many different countries long enough to be changed in different ways, and gain long-lasting experiences.

Surgery is a difficult task, but every surgeon must take some risks, and sometimes make difficult decisions. If there is no other way, the risk is sometimes fatal or unexpected complications can occur, but sometimes there’s no other way to treat a patient.

I’ve written about some of my patients who encountered complications, but the majority of my patients experienced a smooth recovery. I have described the complications in very short simple sentences so that everyone can understand. I completed over five thousand medium and major surgeries in very different cities, and all are documented.

Somebody once said that if you work you can make mistakes, but you don’t make mistakes if you don’t work!

I wanted always to live in my city, but there was always unrest, either political or financial. In fact there has never been stability in this country, even though we have some of the oldest cities in the world, Damascus and Aleppo. We are not able to live under peaceful conditions for longer than a decade. Syria is a very rich country and all Syrians could live together in a good and prosperous way. The question is why can’t they? We have over ten minorities, some with different religions and different languages. Are the Syrians too stupid to accept that? Or is religion the main factor that encourages them to kill each other? What role did Israel or the CIA play in the latest conflict? A hundred years ago, there was no Israel or CIA, but even then there were several wars between Syrians, mostly religious ones. Religions should bring people together and not make wars and encourage killing of each other, otherwise it is not religion. Instead, it’s a war or devil’s party, or economic state system. I cannot imagine a God who orders killing other people who don’t believe in your faith.

In Syria the first Alphabet was discovered and Damascus was the first inhabited city in the world. The Assyrians made the first Calendar. (It’s now the year 6767, as recording started 4750 BC). Major world heritage sites are already destroyed in Palmyra and elsewhere. So why are we fighting each other and destroying each other?

My mother, a tall beautiful young lady, with coloured eyes, (everyone would see and comment on her beauty) came from a relatively well-established family and married my father at the age of fifteen. My father was eight years older and a hard worker. This must have been 1937. They fell in love with each other until death separated them thirty-nine years later.

At that time in our community, it was normal for girls to be married very early. Since then, this has changed in the urban areas, because girls now want to go to university before they marry. Earlier, it was the custom that girls should marry as soon as possible, because no man would marry an old woman, meaning older than 20 years.

Seven years into their marriage, I was born one week before Christmas on December 19th 1944 as my parents told me, so accepted this date as my birthday. My father wrote it in one Bible which he kept in a safe place. There was no official registration at that time.

My father told me once that our family name was Hajjar, which means stone-builder, but his grand grandfather changed it when he started trading with Dibs, which is the grapes-syrup, and took the new family name from that profession.

In Syrian cities most family names are related to a specific profession, or derived from the area’s name, as in other countries. In the villages they don’t usually have a family name; you find the family name as the pre-name of the father or grand-father, or the tribe’s name. There you don’t find actual family names.

I don’t remember anything from the WWII, but I know that my parents didn’t have the best memories. They told me about battles between Vichy’s soldiers and De Gaulle’s soldiers, because Syria was under French Mandate. But apparently the population didn’t suffer much from that war, in contrast to the suffering during the WWI, where inhabitants of Aleppo endured severe starvation and famine under the Turks. All the harvests were taken for their armies and the population were left starving under the Ottoman Empire. Since that time, Syrians have never liked the Turks, because anyone who opposed them was slaughtered. They ruled Syria and other countries with an iron fist under the mask of Islam, even as the Capital was in Damascus or Baghdad.

We lived in a small house in a poor Christian quarter in Aleppo.

It was an Arabic style house with one floor about three meters high with a kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms.

One evening in 1946, my father and his nephew bought our first radio. The radio was so heavy and big that they had to bring it through the large window and carry it from both sides. It was something new for our family to have a big box to listen to music and hear the news.

I was maybe few years old, too young to understand what it all meant, but I do remember it.

A few days later we were sleeping, and my mother heard noises, as if somebody was trying to force entry into the home. She woke my father who jumped up and tried to catch the thief, but it was too late. He got away. My mother told her father, who came and watched over the home for several days until he was sure that the incident would not be repeated.

On one occasion, I remember my father took me to the barber in another part of Aleppo and I was circumcised, of course without anaesthetic. My father gave me an ice cream as a reward. It went very fast and we could walk back home. It must not have been very painful, but I cried.

In comparison we now use Plastibell and general anaesthesia for such a procedure.

It was not routine that Christians should be circumcised, but due to the influence of the Muslim community, it was done by some people. The majority of Christians, however, did not do it. Today they are doing it for medical reasons as it could reduce the risk of cancer.

At Christmas and Easter, the children used to go to the grandparents to say Happy Easter, kiss their hand, and receive sweets and one Syrian Pound, which was useful money to buy the other sweets we liked. The East-Christians celebrate Eastern much more than Christmas.

I remember my paternal grandfather. He died during my early childhood at the age of 97.

We visited him sometimes and saw him working on his manual loom making all kinds of carpets. It impressed me how quickly he could work, but I don’t remember visiting him often. Maybe my father didn’t have a good relationship with him because he prevented him from continuing his studies at school when he was a child, during a time when he wanted to. He had to start working at the age of ten. Or maybe because his father remarried after the death of his mother. He was so young that he didn’t remember what she looked like, but he loved her very much, because he liked to talk about her. Or another reason may be that he was not well-treated by his stepmother. Whatever the reason, he never liked to speak about his father.

My father had a poor old aunt, with no one to look after her, so my mother used to cook for her and I took the food almost daily to her. She loved me. Before she died she gave my father an old painting which she inherited from her father, painted in 1733 (Jesus and Maria). Later, my father gave it to me, and I was very proud of it.

Chapter Two

SCHOOL

T he first school day was a nightmare for me. I remember I was crying all the time. My mother and my older sister held my hands and carried me to the school which was few hundred meters from our home. I remember this incident well. I was afraid of going to school because perhaps I didn’t want to be separated from my mom. Later, I grew up to like my school so much that I went by myself, and in the following years I was one of the best in class.

My mother, like any other mother, always tried to teach her children to love her parents and her family. I was always very loved by my maternal grandparents and I always enjoyed visiting them. My grandmother Marie always welcomed me with some sweets and other food, and my grandfather, always hugged me and would share fairy tales about a huge snake which attacked him in the field and how he could kill it. We were always very excited! Unfortunately, as years went on, his heavy smoking caught up with him and he eventually passed away from throat cancer.

Later, I experienced the death of my grandmother when she was at an advanced age, after she’d suffered repeated strokes.

It is really quite strange that if you are sick your mother might sit near you day and night until you recover, ready to sacrifice her life for you. But when a mother gets sick and old, as in the case of my grandmother who was unconscious and had to be fed by NG-Tube, then everybody wishes for her suffering and life to end, even though she worked all her life serving them. I think this is part of nature’s rule about human beings. You find this cycle of humanity all over the world.

My mother’s brothers and sisters also loved me very much, especially my maternal uncle Johannes, who was the youngest of his brothers, and four years older than me. During our childhood we played together and I slept over sometimes. We were true friends. He always wanted to show that he was older than me. It was ok with me and I respected that, because I knew he loved me. One day, he received some distressing news from his physician who diagnosed cancer in his throat. He applied for a visa for France to go there for treatment, but unfortunately, he was unsuccessful after several months of waiting, because Syrians were not wanted in many countries.

Later, when I became a physician, his son called me early one morning yelling on the phone that his father had difficulty breathing. He lived close to our apartment and I ran to him. He was not cyanotic or blue in colour, but could not breathe, so we helped him to the car. An ambulance would take hours to arrive. His son had driven us to the hospital where I worked. He was too obese to be carried into the hospital. We arrived in the ambulance and the anaesthetist and cardiologist arrived soon after. At that moment, he collapsed from cardiac arrest. We tried CPR intensively, but he did not come back. I could not help him, and he passed away under my hands. I was very sad for days, as I lost an irreplaceable friend. To this day, I believe his death was attributed to a massive cardiac Infarct not related to his cancer.

My father started his own construction business. It must have been early 1954. He built a nice building in a new quarter, an area newly opened for construction by the government. It was unoccupied land with a Jewish cemetery on one side. I saw some empty graves which no one had claimed because most of the Jews had left the city and gone to Israel. It was in the centre of the city. I remember it was a soccer playground. My father kept one of the bigger apartments in the building for himself and so we were able to move to another quarter of Aleppo. Later he built several other buildings in the same street. He built a thriving construction business, and where we lived later became a very expensive one.

Because my father used to borrow money from someone very rich, he built the building and payed back the money at high interest rates. There were no banks to do such business with them. This man trusted my father absolutely. In fact, when his father died, he brought two big suitcases to put in our apartment to avoid paying taxes. My father kept them there for over three months and gave them back later at his request. He told him then that the contents were cash money and documents.

In the Middle East it is tradition to have one big room for receiving guests. This room is called the salon and it’s usually the biggest room in the apartment. We were in a relatively big apartment but with only two bedrooms. There was one for my parents and one for us, several kids, and one big room for the guests who