America Is Stealing the World’s Doctors
It was not an unusual death. Kunj Desai, a young doctor in training at University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia, had seen many that were not so different and were equally needless. Still, this was the one that altered all his plans. “A guy came in, and he had a stab wound,” Desai recalled, “and his intestines got injured.” The operation was delayed, and the wound became infected. “Whatever he was eating would come out of his belly,” Desai said. A carefully managed diet would have helped the man heal, but there were no dietitians at the hospital nor any IV drips of liquid nutrients with which to feed him. “He withered away to probably about 100 pounds when he died.”
The man was in his 30s, and his wife and children would have to fend for themselves. It was 2004, and Desai had worked at the chronically understaffed and underfinanced hospital for a year and a half. The hospital blood bank was often out of blood, and the lab was unreliable. The patients were often so poor that Desai would pay for private lab tests out of his own pocket. Desai came home in tears one day after being unable to save a premature baby boy. When the man with the stab wound died, the accumulation of preventable deaths — at what was, he kept reminding himself, the best public hospital in the country — finally became too heavy to bear.
“We were pretending to be doctors,” Desai, who is 35, told me when we first met. This was in the cafeteria of University Hospital in Newark, and Desai was still in his surgical scrubs after a 30-hour shift. He talked about what he saw in Lusaka in the somewhat stream-of-consciousness way that war veterans sometimes speak about the battlefield. “What was I really doing?” he said. “Making myself feel happy? No.”