"'Hello, hello!' A few minutes later, Dr. Najjar strode into my private room, 1276, his voice booming. He had a measured gait and a slight slope to his back that made his head fall a few inches in front of his body, most likely due to the hours he spent hunched over a microscope. His thick mustache was worn at the tips from his habit of twisting and pulling at it when he was deep in thought. He extended his hand to my mother, who, in her eagerness, held it firmly a bit longer than normal. Then he introduced himself to my father, who rose to greet him from the chair by my bed. 'Let's go through her medical history with you before I begin,' he said. His Syrian accent hopped rhythmically, sticking on and accentuating the hard consonants, often turning t's into d's. When he got excited, he dropped prepositions and combined words, as if his speech could not keep up with his thoughts. Dr. Najjar always stressed the importance of getting a full health history from his patients. ('You have to look backward to see the future,' he often said to his residents.) As my parents spoke, he took note of symptoms--headaches, bedbug scare, flulike symptoms, numbness, and the increased heart rate--that the other doctors had not explored, at least not in one full picture. He jotted these all down as key findings. And then he did something none of the other doctors had done: Dr. Najjar redirected his attention and spoke directly to me, as if I was his friend instead of his patient. One of the remarkable things about Dr. Najjar was his very personal, heartfelt bedside manner. He had an intense sympathy for the weak and powerless, which, as he told me later, came from his own experiences as a little boy growing up in Damascus, Syria. He had done poorly in school, and his parents and teachers had considered him lazy. When he was ten, after he failed test after test in his private Catholic school, his principal had told his parents that he was beyond help: 'Education is not for everyone. Maybe it would be best for him to learn a trade.' Angry as he was, his father didn't want to stop his schooling--education was far too important--so although he didn't have high hopes, he put his son in public school instead. During his first year at public school, one teacher took a special interest in the boy and often made a point to praise him for his work, slowly raising his confidence. By the end of that year, he came home with a glowing, straight A report card. He father was apoplectic. 'You cheated,' Salim said, raising his hand to punish his son. The next morning, his parents confronted the teacher. 'My son doesn't get these types of grades. He must be cheating.'
'No, he's not cheating. I can assure you of that.'
'Then what kind of school are you running here, where a boy like Souhel can get these kinds of grades?'
The teacher paused before speaking again. 'Did you ever think that you might actually have a smart son? I think you need to believe in him.'
Dr. Najjar would eventually graduate at the top of his class in medical school and immigrate to the United States, where he not only became an esteemed neurologist but also an epileptologist and neuropathologist. His own story carried with it a moral that applied to all of his patients: he was determined never to give up on any of them."
