The Pathologist: She Confronts the Virus From Inside Nursing Homes

In Iraq, al-Quraishi was expected, like most of her colleagues, to take a turn in the E.R. The conditions were appalling, brought on by years of war and years of sanctions preceding it, she said. “Kids were dying of the simple flu, a simple GI infection, because we had no medicine,” she said. “I worked in a hospital where we had no IV fluid, and when we did, no line to run the fluid through.”

For reasons she still doesn’t know, al-Quraishi and her husband, who also trained as a doctor, were targeted by the insurgency in Iraq. “We kept moving from one area to another,” she said. “Trying to keep my children safe. We were one family of thousands who experienced the same thing.”

Eleven years after the U.S. invasion, after a lengthy and often bewildering application process, al-Quraishi and her young family were resettled as refugees in Texas, where she tried without success to resume her life as a doctor.

“I made an appointment with the head of the pathology department at a huge local hospital,” she told me. “I said, ‘I am a pathologist from Iraq and I am interested in volunteering.’ I just wanted them to know me.”

Recertifying in the U.S., though, is notoriously costly and time-consuming; in 2020 there were, by one estimate, about 263,000 immigrants and refugees living in America who, despite being trained internationally in health and medicine, are unable to work. Instead, al-Quraishi took jobs at CVS and Popeyes and tried to stay current in her field, eventually moving her family to New Jersey for the job as a pathology assistant, for which she was initially paid so little she struggled to make rent. Working, once again, in the medical field, was both a relief and a heartbreak. “Doctors don’t take you seriously,” she said. “That’s the most painful part.”

When Covid-19 hit the U.S., exposing systemic flaws in medical care, al-Quraishi felt uniquely prepared by her experience in Iraq. Not only did she understand how to work in extreme situations, she found the Iraqi medical education to be more well-rounded than the American one. “Not necessarily better,” she said. “But the system is different.” The fact that doctors were required to work in E.R.s strained by crisis felt particularly relevant now. “Iraq went through a lot,” she said. “There was always a need.”

After Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey wrote an executive order granting temporary licenses to internationally trained medical professionals to help respond to Covid, al-Quraishi and her husband put on their own scrubs and masks and showed up at a hospital. “I said, ‘We are from Baghdad,” she said. “We know how to handle difficult situations. Just give us the chance.”