by Bennet Omalu
And that’s all pathology was ever meant to be—a next step, not a career. Yet, as my father’s name always reminded me, you never know what tomorrow may bring. I would soon discover the tomorrow God had in store for me to be filled with surprises.
Chapter Seven
Through the Wilderness
Early on in my faith journey, I had many doubts. Through my teenage years and on into my twenties, doubt was as much a part of my life as faith. It was not my study of science that caused me to doubt God. If anything, the deeper I dove into science, the more I saw the wonders of God. The more I learned, the more I realized I did not know. I plunged myself deeper into the abyss of knowledge, only to discover the waters are deeper than my mind could ever imagine. And to me, the end of the pursuit of knowledge has always brought me to the same destination: God. He is the end of all knowledge. While faith seeks God’s truth through the revelation of Himself through His Word and in our souls, science seeks the truth behind the designs and secrets of the physical universe; both pursuits lead to the same destination. All truth is God’s truth, and all truth leads back to Him. I never doubted that.
No, the doubt with which I wrestled surrounded one of the essential truths of Christianity: Why did Jesus, the Son of God, the One who is preeminent in all things in heaven and on earth, why did He take on the form of an ordinary man and come to earth to suffer? Why did He allow Himself to be humiliated, dehumanized, and ridiculed? Why did He choose to experience the cross of Calvary, to die such a slow, agonizing, and painful death? From my limited perspective, I thought that since He is God, there had to be other more humane, more reasonable ways for Him to redeem all of mankind without having to experience the cross of Calvary. Why Calvary, and why the cross? Why did saving the human race from our sin demand that the Son of God suffer?
Surprisingly, my doubts began to lift when I started to experience life’s hardships, difficulties, and challenges. When I came face-to-face with man’s inhumanity to himself and to others, the answers to my doubts about the cross began to come to me. The answers weren’t exactly in the form of a why as much as a calling to follow Christ’s example. When I encountered racism or bigotry, I went back to the story of the cross. There I saw His arrest, the mock trial, His flogging, and His carrying His cross up Calvary. Then I watched the soldiers put the nails in His hands and His feet. Through it all, He submitted Himself to the will of His Father. By faith and in hope, He totally surrendered to His suffering. As one who professes faith in Jesus, I must now totally surrender in faith, like Jesus, to the pain and darkness and humiliation I face in life. Only then, as I surrender in humility and strength, will I emerge victorious as Jesus did when He rose from the dead. The pain and suffering are not the end of the story. In Jesus’ resurrection, we are guaranteed victory. But like everything in life, you never know how strongly you believe something until it is put to the test.
• • • •
After I decided to pursue a residency in pathology to continue my training in the United States, I still had to be matched to a program. To do that, I had to first apply to different medical school residency programs. Before I came to the United States, I had to deposit $10,000 to cover all my expenses for my one year of study. I thought the money would last much longer than a year, but when I began my classes at the University of Washington, I quickly realized I was computer illiterate. I could not even type. This placed me at a huge disadvantage in comparison to the other students. The only way to learn computers is through experience, which led me to take a huge risk. One day, I went to the local computer store and picked out a desktop computer. I also purchased several software packages, including Microsoft Office and a typing program. By the time I walked out of the computer store, I had spent close to $4,000. You must remember that computers were much more expensive in 1995 than they are today. Not many people owned their own personal computers, but I was so desperate to catch up that I was willing to pay any price.
Looking back, I am extremely thankful I made this investment. However, spending 40 percent of all the money I had in the world created a new problem. I needed to do something to make more. On top of that, if I was going to have the money to cover the residency program application expenses and to have the money to travel to wherever I needed to go for the interviews in places where I hoped to match, I had to find a part-time job.
I came across a notice on one of the bulletin boards on campus. “Housekeeper wanted. 10–15 hours per week. $6.00 per hour.” I pulled the notice down and called the number on the bottom. No one answered, so I left a message. Apparently there had not been a line of people waiting to land this job. The homeowner called me back and immediately hired me. I had called about other jobs, but this was the first and only one where anyone bothered to call me back.
When I reported for work the first day, I discovered the house was a large Victorian home with five bedrooms. The owner, an older Chinese woman, rented the rooms to students. She took one look at me, gave a sort of disgusted grunt, and said, “Follow me.” She took me to where she kept the cleaning supplies. “You can use these, but you better believe I know how much is in here and how much you should use. I keep track.” It took me a moment to realize she was implying she thought I might steal some of her supplies. She then led me to the bedrooms I was supposed to clean. As she led me into the first room, she described how she wanted the room cleaned, but she used words and a tone that one might use to someone with no education and no sense. I needed the work, so I just sloughed it off.
I went to work cleaning the rooms she assigned to me that day. When I finished the first, she went in and exploded. “Get back in here!” she yelled. I did as I was told. “I see a smudge on that window,” she said in a very hateful tone. “How can you call a room clean when there is a smudge on the window?” She then proceeded to find fault with everything else I had done in the room. I offered to redo it, but she said, “I’m not paying you to do the same work twice. Leave it. I’ll come back and finish it myself.”
“Do you want me to keep cleaning the other rooms?” I asked.
“Yes, I want you to keep cleaning. I didn’t hire you to stand around and talk, did I?” She then called me something in Chinese that I did not understand, but I had a pretty good idea she wasn’t saying, “Good job.”
I went back to work. Like everything I strive to do, I did the work as close to perfectly as I could. In spite of her complaints, the woman must have liked the work I did because she called me to come back and clean other rooms the next week. And the next. And the next. However, every time I went to work, she always spoke down to me and cursed at me and found fault with everything I did. But she paid me the $6.00 an hour, just as she promised, and for that I was thankful.
About a month after I started working as a housekeeper, I was at work scrubbing some stains off the floor when a new tenant walked into the house to drop off her bags. Like me, she was an international graduate student. She was from China. When she saw me down on the floor scrubbing away, she gave me a very puzzled look. The homeowner was close by, criticizing my work as usual. The student paused for a moment and then asked, “Aren’t you a student at school?”
I gave a very muffled “yes, how are you?”
The student then turned to the homeowner and said, “He’s a graduate student in the school of public health with me.”
The homeowner’s eyes got wide, as if the girl’s words had collided with all she had assumed about me and was now about to make her head explode.
The student turned back to me. “I know a little about you. You are a doctor, right?”
“Yes, I am,” I said very quietly.
That did it. My boss looked at me like she’d just seen a ghost. The look was a mixture of shock, surprise, and embarrassment over the way she had treated me.
I finished my work, received my pay for the day, and never went back. I was very embarrassed for the woman. She called me the next day with a very different tone, one now of respect, but I
did not answer or return her call. I thought it would be better to move on than to put both of us in a very awkward situation. A friend told me about a job loading trucks at night at UPS, which I took. Between going to classes, studying, and working nights, I spent what little time I had left researching residency programs.
• • • •
I filled out more than a hundred residency program applications in the tiny attic room I rented from the elderly woman near the University of Washington Medical Center. I basically sent one to every pathology program I could find. When I did not receive any responses, I began sending applications to internal medicine and family practice programs as well. After sending out a very large number of applications, I came home one day and found a letter waiting for me. It came from one of the top hospitals in Seattle. I ripped the envelope open, excitedly expecting good news inside. Instead I found a handwritten note attached to my application package just as I had sent it. The note read, “You are not as competitive as the doctors who work here. Please go back to Africa where you came from. You are not good enough to work here, and we don’t think you ever will be.” I dropped the letter and wept.
Out of the more than a hundred applications I sent out, I only received two invitations to fly out to a program and interview for one of their positions. I flew to Massachusetts for one interview and to New York City for the other. The flights drained all my savings. I started looking for a better job and found one in a local nursing home. I went to work as a nurse’s aide. Most days I started work around 4:00 p.m. or 9:00 p.m. and worked until 12:00 a.m. or 5:00 a.m., respectively. The bus ride to and from work took about two hours each way, which was when I slept. I didn’t have much choice. This was the only way I was going to survive.
Most of the patients with whom I worked at the nursing home suffered from dementia, and most were women. My duties included delivering their meals, giving them baths, cleaning them up when they soiled themselves, changing their diapers, and dressing and undressing them, as well as helping them walk around or pushing them in their wheelchairs. I put them to bed at night and read to them or even sang them to sleep. Like I said, most suffered from some form of dementia.
I had one lovely patient who was more on the obese side and was not in her right mind. Every time I walked into her room, she said to me, “Nigger, you don’t belong here. You get away from me. Don’t you dare touch me.” I passed it off as the dementia talking. She didn’t know what she was saying. I had to do my job, so I did it. More than once she became very agitated by my presence. Several times she spat at me. I just laughed it off. My supervisor saw what was going on and was shocked by it. “It doesn’t bother me,” I said. “She’s just a poor, demented woman. I don’t know how I might act if I were in her place.”
• • • •
Match Day came in March 1995. This is the day when residency programs announce who they are inviting to come join them. The whole match process is rather odd. At every other stage of higher education, you choose where you want to go. You choose your college—as long as they accept you. The same is true of graduate programs and professional programs like law school and med school. However, for residency you go out and interview with as many programs as give you the opportunity. You then list them in order of your preference. The programs then decide who is going where. You have very little say in the matter. If you do not like where you have matched, you have few options for going elsewhere.
Since I had only interviewed in two places, I didn’t care which one chose me as long as one did. That would have been my attitude even if I had had a hundred interviews. I just wanted to match somewhere. Anywhere.
But I did not. No offer came from Massachusetts or New York. I only had one option. As soon as my one-year visiting scholar program ended, I was going to have to get on a plane and fly back to Nigeria. My visa was going to expire, and the United States had no reason to renew it.
After learning of my failure to match, I went back to my small attic room, disappointed and angry. I wasn’t just disappointed and angry in a general sense. All of my frustrations were aimed at one individual—the One I blamed for the mess in which I now found myself. I was angry at God and I was not shy about telling Him so. “How could You lead me so far, only to leave me in the middle of the sea to drown?” I asked Him. “If I knew this was what You were going to do to me, I never would have left home to begin with. I never would have worked so hard to come to America.” I guess you can call this prayer, since I was talking to God. If so, you can say I prayed for most of the night. I unloaded on Him. “All of this was a sham, a cruel joke You have played on me,” I prayed. “I wish You would have just left me alone and that You would leave me alone now.” At one point after expressing my disappointed frustrations with God, I collapsed into tears.
I wanted to go to sleep, but I could not. Emotionally spent, I rolled over on my bed and looked at the clock, which read 3:00. I felt so alone and lonely and hopeless in that tiny attic room. Finally, my eyelids started to feel heavy, as if sleep was going to take me after all. In that moment of finally feeling like rest was near, my heart turned loose of its last piece of bitterness. I whispered in the dark, “Oh, God, I do believe and trust You and love You. All things are possible with You, and You can make a way if You choose. All things were made by You and for You and exist in You. In the name of Jesus, I confess that all things are possible in You.” I still felt the hopelessness and doubt and despair, but one thing I knew above all others: I could not turn away from my God. I did not know what He had planned for me, but I trusted Him with my life.
I drifted off to sleep, planning to stay in bed all the next day and maybe even the day after that. With that, I passed out.
The phone started ringing at 6:30 a.m. I slapped at it like it was the alarm and I was trying to reach the snooze button. I woke up enough to pick up the phone and say hello. On the other end, I heard a deep, baritone voice with a Mexican accent. “Dr. Omalu?” he asked.
“Yes, this is Dr. Bennet Omalu,” I said, now more awake.
“This is Dr. Carlos Navarro, professor of pathology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Colombia University and director of the residency program at Harlem Hospital Center. I apologize for calling so early. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“No, no, no, it’s not too early,” I lied.
“I’ll get right to the point. Have you already matched with a program?” Dr. Navarro asked.
“No, I haven’t.”
“Good. We did not offer you one of the two positions we had open. However, one of the doctors to whom we offered it has turned us down.”
“Okay,” I said.
“We would like tentatively to offer the position to you.”
I could hardly believe my ears. “Okay,” I said, almost in shock. “What do I need to do?”
“Would it be possible for you to come back to New York City tomorrow and meet with the director of the department of pathology? She was not available when you interviewed with us the first time.”
“I would love to do that, but . . .” I hesitated. “To be honest with you, Dr. Navarro, I cannot spend so much money on a last-minute flight to New York and then have you not accept me.”
Dr. Navarro gave me a reassuring laugh. “I understand,” he said. “Now, while I cannot guarantee that you will be offered the position, I can say there is a 95 percent chance the spot is yours.”
“That’s good enough for me,” I said. “I will be there first thing tomorrow morning.”
After I hung up the phone, I went to the bank to check my balance. I had about $1,500 in my account because I had just been paid by the nursing home. I took $1,200 and bought a red-eye ticket to New York. Fifteen hours later, I was at LaGuardia Airport, dressed in my best suit with $100 in my pocket. I took the subway train to Harlem Hospital for my meeting with the pathology department director. After the meeting, I rode the train back to LaGuardia. My flight didn’t leave until early the next morning, but I did not hav
e the money to stay in a hotel that night. Instead I found a spot on the floor in the check-in lounge and slept there in my suit. About ten other people joined me there, although I was the only one wearing a tie.
A day or so after I arrived back home in Seattle, Dr. Navarro called. “Dr. Omalu, Bennet, I am delighted to tell you that we would like to offer you a spot in our residency program starting this summer.”
Of course I accepted.
After I hung up the phone, I thought back to that dark night when I had lost all hope and nearly lost my faith. The Bible says, “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.”1 When I allowed my frustration to boil over into anger at God, I could only see what was in front of me. That was why doubt came. I wanted to give up in the face of difficulty. The Lord seemed to whisper to me in that moment, “Bennet, life is a struggle. Christ struggled, but He never wavered. So you too must not give up or give in for the purpose I have for you. You have to continue fighting the good fight and running the good race. You cannot tire until you take your last breath. You will rest eternally when I call you home.” Those were my last thoughts that night when I fell asleep, and now God had shown me how faithful He truly is.
I hoped to match with any residency program. God wanted me in Harlem in a program connected to an Ivy League school. Just because I did not initially match with them was not a problem for God. I had lost sight of the evidence of things not seen. I prayed I would not make that mistake again.
Chapter Eight
Land of Contradictions
When I decided to go public with what I discovered in my autopsy of Mike Webster in 2002, I naively believed America and the National Football League would welcome my findings. Growing up in Nigeria and looking longingly at America from afar, I believed the United States to be free of corruption and hidden agendas. I thought it to be a place where people love and value truth to such a degree that they would want to know the truth about what the game of football can do to those who play it. I wanted to announce the Mike Webster case on the home turf of the NFL because I believed my discovery was good for football and would make it a better, safer game more in line with the trends of American society in the twenty-first century. Since football is America’s game, I thought what would be good for football would be good for America and good for the humanity in us all.
