Mary Schwaner - Courage in a White Coat

COURAGE

IN A WHITE COAT

by Mary Schwaner

with Foreword by
Bobbi Chambers Hawk, M.D.

2018

Prairie Muse Books Inc.

An American woman lives her dream...
a ten-year medical mission in India,
a fairytale marriage
and two years in the Philippine Islands.

But having survived three years
in a Japanese prisoner of war camp,
she discovers her little family was just
twenty-four hours from

execution.

A Wartime Biographical Novel based on the experience of
Dr. Dorothy Joy Kinney Chambers
and her family

Taken from the childhood experience of
Robert Bruce Chambers
and his sister Carol Chambers Park
and the detailed written record of their mother
Dorothy Kinney Chambers, M.D.

FOREWORD

We are all influenced by figures both real and literary, historical and contemporary. Many lives have crossed ours, even if only through written words, recorded speeches or letters. We each may have a memorable quote that guides us, be it from Teddy Roosevelt: Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those timid spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat; Atticus Finch: [Courage is] when you know youre licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do; or Kent M. Keiths quote made famous by Mother Teresa of Calcutta: The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; do good anyway. What if we could get to know these people in the lives they were living that shaped who they became?

I knew my Grandma Chambers as a matriarch of the family. She insisted on wearing oxford shoes with a two-inch heel as it was better for her back. She wore girdles and garters to hold her stockings in place. She could sew anythingmens suits, Easter dresses for the girls, or hand-pieced double wedding ring quilts. She could cook a pretty mean Chinese yum-yum and made the best marmalade and zucchini relish stored in jars topped with paraffin. She could knit a sweater without a patternsimply pick your yarn color and stand still while a tape measure makes its way around you. Your next birthday or Christmas your completed sweater would arrive and fitbecause she would add extra inches when she knew you were still growing.

And, she could tell stories. She told stories of her working days in India about various cases that had made lasting impressions on her. She told stories of Baby Junaki. She told stories of the challenges faced when returning to the U.S. on furlough and the difficulty of being recognized as a woman and a practicing physician. She told stories of great accomplishments, of survival by wit, skill and thrift such as the sweater for Fred that was unraveled and re-knit to a dress for Carol and subsequently a sweater for Bobby. She had made three different garments sequentially out of the same skein of yarn.

Through these pages I am delighted to meet and journey with my grandmother, Dorothy Joy Kinney. I can venture with her around the world, just out of internship to blaze a trail for others to followother missionaries, other physicians, other women. I can ponder her frustrations with missionary needs abutting local culture, her delight in her vocation serving others and her wishes for a family of her own. I can worry for sick patients with her, waiting to hear the next installment for news of recovery or news of dying. I can share in her heartbreak of feeling and knowing that sometimes you cant do anything other than wait and let time pass. I can feel the drive of service to others. I can feel the immense power of the love of Christianity as it touches so many lives.

I hope you enjoy getting to know Dorothy. She was a truly remarkable woman with a passion for service to others whether as a physician, a missionary, a daughter, a prisoner of war, a wife, a mother, a member of the Peace Corps, or a mentor to young families of foreign graduate students in an American university. Even when wheelchair-bound her last years in a nursing home, she would announce herself and say, Im a doctor, can I help?

Bobbi Chambers Hawk, m.d.

PART ONE

WINGS

Gauhati, India 1935

Six years into Dorothys assignment

CHAPTER ONE

ON THE BREATH OF A SONG

Six years, five months and four days into her dream, Dr. Dorothy Kinney tumbled to the realization that she wore it quite easily now, that mantle of womanhood that had slipped and slid across her shoulders in fits and starts through medical school. But tonight, the realization hit her squarely between the eyes. It fit her almost as elegantly now as did the white coat of her trade, the crisp linen jacket that defined her mission as healer to these people. Her people now. The women and children of Gauhati, India.

Tonight the hospital seemed to be holding its breath in this dark hour. Its new walls and windows buffered the sounds of the nighttime jungle, creating a haven of sorts. Quiet. Waiting.

At the fringes of her mind, Dorothy became aware that someone had opened an outer door, letting a gentle breeze trace its fingers across the doomed child who lay before her. It seemed a welcome embrace.

Shed seen hundreds of children in her six years here. Trembling little boys and girls and hysterical toddlers, most of whom left her care with smiles and hugs before bounding back into the arms of their families.

Not so this dear child. Not even in the worlds finest facility would this child survive.

And certainly not here in Gauhati.

The hospital Dorothy transformed in those six years boasted running water these days. And electricity. These were luxuries she remembered doing without when she arrived in 1928, fresh from the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She never touched the tap without thinking of it, of the early days when her inventive genius was birthed of necessity.

In those first chaotic months, gleaming new sterilizers sat covered and unused, waiting for her to marshal the locals into an effective workforce, to lay pipes, to plumb the surgery, to string wiring along thin, newly plastered walls. Waiting for her to show by example what progress could mean to their rustic community. How many more lives could be saved. And then waiting yet again until some provincial male authority examined every aspect of the carefully designed blueprints and pronounced that yes, this plan would work. Never your plan. Never her plan. That would have rankled their brains too greatly to identify the plan as one drawn up by a mere woman.

But it had alwaysin large partbeen her plan, unfolding in its own time, adding new grains of patience to her oft-challenged core. And she could not help but believe that it has changed the face of survival in Gauhati.

On this January day, dusk has come and gone and night has overtaken the hospital grounds. Dorothy continued to maintain her long vigil at the childs bedside, the thick, damp night hovering beyond the ward windows like a lost soul come to take the child away, the child she has tended for the last ten hours. The delicate eight-year-old girl struggles less now, as she slips from this life to the next.

Dorothy leaned closer, careful not to touch the shredding, blistered skin of the child engulfed in flames just hours earlier. It was an accident. A horrid, tragic accident. When would her people begin to recognize that feeding their cooking fires with kerosene put their entire village at risk?