Modesty in surgery

Islamic doctors struggle with balancing spiritual purity with medical necessity

CASPER, Wyo. (RWN) - She was dying, fast. Blood all over the place, pieces of the windshield in her forehead, in her cheeks, in her eyes. The steering column stayed in the car, but the impact had driven it into her chest. Punctured lung. She's wheezing beneath the oxygen mask.

She's got minutes, doctor, but a scheduling screw up has only males on duty in the Casper General Hospital emergency room.

You've got to rip her clothes off, get the surgery going. But how do you preserve her modesty? Do you let her die?

Ismail Khalid wakes up yelling. It's the middle of the night. He's covered in sweat in his bedroom in Casper. This is what plagues him. How does an emergency room doctor and a devout Muslim cope?

"I wish I had an answer," Khalid says one morning in the hospital coffee shop. "I don't know what I would do. I have a Hippocratic oath, of course, and I think that would take precedence. And I cannot be sure, to be honest with you, because I want to live a pure and plentiful life.

Besides, he says, lowering his voice and motioning to the two Black Robes permanently assigned to the hospital who are sitting at a nearby table, "I wouldn't want to cross them."

Doctors all around the country are trying to deal with an issue that has only come to light with last week's beating of a Michigan emergency room surgeon who tore off a women's dress to save her. A Black Robe agent entered the room and pulled the surgeon into the hallway where he proceeded to beat them.

The public condemnation was swift and Mullah Oxley, head of the religious police, said the agent was disciplined. But he never offered an apology.

"I'm glad that it came out into the open," Khalid says. "I feel terrible for that doctor, but I thought I was the only one who had that fear. Now the staff is talking about it, at least, and that's a start."

There are no good answers. The American Medical Association has issued a statement claiming that the patient's life must come first, ahead of anything else. But imams in at least 15 cities have issued their own statements saying that adherence to the religion must come first.

"What am I to do?" Khalid says.

Administrators at Casper General are forming a committee to study the issues and come up with a policy, but they've only just begun.

"It's a riddle wrapped in an enigma, covered in a puzzle," says Ken Qadry, the hopsital's president. "Every issue that we come upon leads to another. I keep asking the staff 'What's the best way to satisfy two gods?'"



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