Working in Qatar has been amazing because Qataris are such
wonderful, warm people. I can’t stress enough on how friendly
and nice they have been, Dr Usha Bhat tells Anand Holla
As far back as she can remember, Dr Usha Parekh Bhat wanted to become a children’s physician. Thirty nine years after she moved to Qatar as its first specialised peadiatric neurologist, the affable doctor is still living her dream.
At her spacious, new consulting space in Icon (International Center for Orthopedics and Neurosciences) Medical Centre, on a breezy evening, Bhat takes a moment to ponder, her hands resting on a table that holds an assortment of medical papers and soft toys of cartoon characters such as SpongeBob SquarePants in equal measure.
“I have always loved children,” she says, “Right from my
school days, whenever I would see a child crying, I would look at the parents and realise that
they appeared even more disturbed. So the idea of treating a child so as to see the child and the whole family happy, appealed to me.”
Bhat, an expert in dealing with neurological disorders in children from birth to 16 years of age — such as delayed development (physical and mental), mental retardation, central nervous system infections, trauma, and epilepsy — points out that a significant number of children in Qatar suffer from these issues, and even behavioural disorders such as attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity.
“Not many are aware of the highly specialised nature of peadiatric neurology, which essentially relates to the actual development of a child, right from the day of conception and even its nine critical months in the mother’s womb,” Bhat says, “Cerebral palsy, which for instance occurs due to problems during pregnancy or lack of oxygen during delivery, could be easily prevented. Unless we educate the community, these problems won’t be solved.”
It was with this larger resolve, then, that Bhat pursued medicine. The youngest of four from a conservative Gujarati Jain family in India, Bhat joined the Madras Stanley Medical College in 1959. This is where she met her husband Dr N S Bhat, who happens to be the senior-most orthopaedic surgeon in Qatar and consults in the room adjacent to hers at Icon.
“We were classmates and because the first letters of our names were S and U, we always ended up being in the same batches,” she recalls.
Studying together is what got them closer, too. “Rather, I would say he was after me all the time,” she says and laughs. They married in 1972. Famously known as one of Qatar’s first doctor couples, they have earned tremendous goodwill over the years. As Dr N S Bhat puts it, “Once the people of Qatar trust you, they trust you forever.”
Soon after, in Bombay, Bhat found herself involved in a lot of research work at a state-run hospital. Her most career-defining one was her thesis for her MD, an extensive research on the Tuberculosis of the central nervous system.
“Tuberculosis was very rampant then. Old TB patients would keep coughing at home, spraying the bacilli on children who too would contract the disease,” she says, “Unfortunately, if a lot of bacilli were to come in contact with a malnourished child, they would go straight into the brain, often resulting in fatal cases of Tuberculosis meningitis.”
Under the guidance of professors Dr PM Udani and Dr DK Dastur, Bhat analysed 500 clinical cases from the ward and conducted 100 autopsies. This meant that she examined the brains of children who died of it and co-related the findings with the clinical reports. “Merely administering anti-TB treatment wasn’t working at all,” she recalls.
It was a peculiarly tragic trend. Bhat had to unravel why these children, despite medication, upon returning home, would report high fever, have convulsions, and die. “Our study found out about the bacilli triggering an allergic reaction in the brain, causing the brain to suddenly swell, cone down, and thereby cause instant death,” she says.
Cracking the cause led them to the solution. “We prescribed Mannitol as it instantly reduced swelling. We found that within 24 or 48 hours, the children began opening their eyes, moving their limbs, and a week later, walked out of the hospital fit as a fiddle,” she says, smiling. This path-breaking research won her the coveted Tata Memorial Fellowship.
Next, she was awarded the Commonwealth fellowship in London — where she and her husband studied together — for her research on neuro-muscular disorders in children, with Professor Victor Dubowitz. That would be among a vast body of work and experience she has gained in child neurology by training in India, UK, the US, and of course, Qatar.
All set to reinvigorate their practice, the couple had packed their bags for India. “My father had saved a huge piece of land in Chennai for me to build and run a hospital. The intention was to serve our own people back in India,” she recalls. But that is not how it was ordained.
Towards the end of 1975, Qatar’s Medical Director, a Goan-British gentleman, flew to London to scout for doctors for the upcoming Hamad hospital. “He convinced us to move to Qatar. He asked us to just stop by and see if we would like to stay here,” she says, “And we did.”
Dr N S Bhat, too, admits that they thought of staying only for two years. That thought, however, would have multiplied 20 times next December. A nation blooming into all shades of prosperity seemed like an ideal dwelling place to realise their dreams. The Bhats started off practicing at Rumailah Hospital — Qatar’s only hospital then — and in 1985, moved to Hamad.
Although their proficiency in Arabic has helped them reach out to hundreds of Qatari families — including most of the country’s VVIPs — language, initially, was a barrier. “That’s why one of the first things we did was to master Arabic,” says Bhat. “We took up the three-year-course at Doha’s Institute of Arabic Language. In the first year, there were 100 learners, and in the second, there were 10. In the third year, it was just the two of us,” she says and laughs.
By 1990, Bhat started practicing at her own peadiatric clinic in Doha, and two years later, the couple left for India to set up the Amar Hospital and Usha Health Centre in Chennai. Drawn by a desire to “improve the quality of life of the less fortunate,” Bhat was interested in encouraging community peadiatrics that involved taking medicines to the door-step of under-privileged children in villages.
The Bhats’ tryst with Qatar was far from over though. In 1999, when the Doha Clinic was being turned into Qatar’s first private hospital, Mr Bhat was roped in to set up the hospital’s orthopaedic department, and soon Mrs Bhat joined him, too. It wasn’t hard to foresee as just like her husband, who is to known as Qatar’s most renowned orthopaedic surgeon, she too figures foremost among Qatar’s peadiatric neurologists.
“The variety of cases I came across in Qatar was unbelievable,” she says. Sometime in the mid-70s, for instance, Bhat encountered an eight-year-old girl perpetually troubled by an inexplicable stomachache. “She was an extremely bright Egyptian girl. I stumbled upon a hard lump around her belly and found it to be abnormal,” Bhat recounts.
It was only when Bhat examined the girl carefully that she found the clue. Bhat explains, “I noticed that there was no hair at the back of her head. Later, both she and her parents admitted that she had a habit of pulling her hair out and eating it. The stomach pain was a case of trichobezoar. When I reported it, it was only the eighth such case in the world.” Trichobezoar or human hairball is a complication of trichophagia or eating of the hair.
Yet, more precious than the professional experience has been the inter-personal one, feels Bhat. “Working in Qatar has been amazing because Qataris are such wonderful, warm people. I can’t stress enough on how friendly and nice they have been to us,” she says.
“When we started our practice here, Qatar was small and only around 50 families lived here. But we knew everybody. They accepted us and considered us as part of their families. They would celebrate Eid with us, and still do. For us, that closeness is perhaps the most valuable part of our being in Qatar.”
With their two children staying abroad — General Physician son Amar and ophthalmologist daughter Leena are settled in England — it’s here, in Doha, that the Bhats feel at home. Much of it, they believe, has to do with winning the Qataris’ trust across generations.
“Even the fourth generation of the families comes to us. For instance, we knew Akbar
al-Bakar’s (CEO of Qatar Airways) parents and we knew him before he got married. Later, we knew his wife’s family. Now his children come to us, and so do his parents,” she says, “We cherish such relationships.”
