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 you’re 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. Keith’s 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 anything—men’s 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 pattern—simply 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 fit—because 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 follow—other 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 can’t 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, “I’m a doctor, can I help?”
—Bobbi Chambers Hawk, m.d.
PART ONE
WINGS
Gauhati, India 1935
Six years into Dorothy’s 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.
She’d 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 world’s 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 always—in large part—been 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 child’s 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?
The stricken villagers had borne horrified witness to the little girl’s stuttering progress as she stumbled into the hospital on spindly, singed legs, her family swirling around h
er, wailing, desperate to help, knowing they dared not touch her lest she shriek in agony once again.
The Satribari nurses experienced the same horror, by nature needing to sweep her into their arms and take away her pain. But they dared not. Their cries had drawn Dorothy to the central hallway, and in a flash she discerned the child’s desperate condition and darted back into her office. The beautiful sari she kept there wafted its delicate wings around her as she dashed with it back to the corridor.
Take the other end, she had called to Lahaori, her steady right hand. Come behind her with me!
In one delicately maneuvered scoop they swept the child into the soft hammock they’d created. The little girl keened, jarred into new heights of pain. From every mouth came an answering keen.
We did not mean to hurt you, little one! Be brave, little one!
Quite without realizing it Dorothy began to rock the makeshift hammock as she called out instructions to her staff. It was the most natural movement a mother might make to comfort her child.
Make the softest bed you can, Dorothy cried to the student nurses, and together they created an improvised cradle of feather down pillows.
Through the next sobering hours the young nurses stood at their stations on either side of the child’s bed, spraying a fine intermittent mist laced with honey into the air above the unconscious child’s body. The droplets fell in slow motion, keeping the beautiful fabric of the sari cool and damp.
The breaths were fading now, fragile puffs escaping the child’s lips in between long stretches of silence, little whiffs of air still carrying the kerosene fumes up from lungs the lethal gas has viciously decimated.
When peace like a river attendeth my way…
When sorrows like sea billows roll…
Whatever my lot thou has taught me to say
It is well, it is well with my soul.
The song was a mere whisper, spilling from Dorothy’s lips that hovered just inches from the child’s ear, more prayer than melody.
The bamboo fan whickered softly in the corner.
Go now, little one.
And there it was. The chest stilled, the face quieted. Dorothy waited until the silent prayer roiling within her own heart found its tortured resolution.
She looked up, unable to dispel the grief from her eyes.
Outside the wailing resumed.
CHAPTER TWO
THE STICKING POST
Wispy shreds of a pre-dawn fog still floated beyond her window, like remnants of the shroud that had engulfed her through the sleepless night. Anguish over the loss of the child plagued her still at sunup, yet as always, it had begun to quiet itself, allowing the first glimmer of calm to nudge its way into Dorothy’s awareness.
There was nothing more that could have been done for the child. She knew it, even if she could not yet reconcile it. Alice said so as well, the aging Doctoroni who shared the surgical duties of the burgeoning hospital. Still, the agony of it lived in Dorothy’s bones this morning, and weariness remained, visible in her plodding steps as she retraced her path from the hall table of her little bungalow back to her private bedroom.
She has a letter from home.
Her finger traced the swoopy, loopy lines of the address, following its free and unbounded scrawl across the entire face of the envelope, which was liberally pitted and poked by something held inside. Something more than a letter.
Oh, Wink, you darling girl.
With typical care she sliced the edge of the envelope, almost giving in to the glee that bubbled up as she chased a host of hair pins that cascaded wildly from the folds of her sister’s letter.
Hair pins.
More than a dozen of them.
She caught them up before they fell from her lap and corralled them in a small carved bowl that sat on the dressing table. Who but Wink would even realize what an unexpected bit of joy this would pitch into her day.
Dorothy is the eldest of the four Kinney girls from Colorado. Wink is the baby, the one with the buoyant spirit, who lives every moment on the edge of a whim. In truth, Dorothy suspected that she herself might carry a few of those same whimsical genes. It constantly pestered her with the impulse to dive into the thing that has captured her attention and let the world pass her by as she explores it. But her hard-earned, self-imposed discipline cannot allow it. And so—unlike her baby sister—Dorothy’s free spirit exists under careful internal supervision.
Not so Wink, although she is bright as a button. But the young lady has had long experience at indulging the whim. Pretty Wink gets to be the smart dresser of the four girls, now that Dorothy is out of sight halfway around the world in India. But side by side, one would be hard pressed to guess which of them had just stepped most recently from the jungle, and which one had danced demurely from the pages of the latest Vogue.
Pin curls!
Dorothy chortled. There were pincurls in her future again, thanks to Wink who knew that Dorothy was always losing her hairpins and had no corner drugstore where she might replenish her supply. So Wink took it upon herself to regularly send a few, and they were always welcome. The simple pleasure rendered her ridiculously breathless.
She had been shipboard on the Edavana in the South China Sea in the Fall of 1928 the first time the universe conspired to relieve her of her hairpins. A major squall kept the seas rough for hours, and while other passengers kept to the shelter of their cabins, Dorothy stood at the prow, her face alternately stung by salty waves and pelting rain as she strained toward the future on which she had just embarked. She leaned forward into the buffeting wind, rooting herself at the farthest point from home, and the nearest point to her destiny.
In a matter of moments, the elements had ripped off her scarf, undone her hair, and sent her carefully placed hairpins into the void.
Fall 1928
It blew my hair in forty-leven different directions, lost three-fourths of my hairpins for me and more than once put my skirts up over my head. ...Then after breakfast I put on my oldest shoes, my bathing cap, and my raincoat, and stood at the end of the deck with the Van Putten’s and my, how it did rain.
Oh, how she did love a good storm.
And later, when she sought a bit of privacy on deck, the storm had continued to oblige, wrapping her in a cloak of gusting rain and clashing waves, pelting just hard enough to keep the passengers—and a certain condescending ship’s doctor—sequestered below.
Why was it that she was constantly confronted with men who could not quite grasp the idea that she was a physician?
Miss Kinney, indeed. That’s Doctor Kinney to you, sir.
To make things even messier, there had been another doctor on board. A tea garden doctor who quite openly declared his infatuation for her. Between the two of them trying to impress her with their medical acumen and her employing every bit of subterfuge she could think of to avoid them, Dorothy had found herself quite entertained.
Aboard the Edavana
...then there is a little Scots Doctor—one of the tea garden doctors from near Jorhat. He looks and acts like Charlie Chaplin and has been a regular clown. I think I could have had a proposal last night had I been willing to stay out in the moonlight with him but . . . . I am afraid that my time for matrimony has not arrived yet.
She was happy to isolate herself from them rather than to try and erect some aloof barrier against their wheedling charms.
Dorothy fiddled with one of the hairpins until her hair took on a more polished look. She hadn’t thought of those early days for some time. Of her innocence and midwestern sophistication.
What had she known then of barriers?
There she had been, on a voyage halfway around the world, embarking on a mission for which she knew she’d been born. Afraid to admit she was afraid.
Screw your courage to the sticking post had become her daily litany.
Truth be told, she’d worked that one to the limit, taken by surprise as she was by the pettifog
gery and crises she’d been faced with daily in Assam, and the primitive, makeshift hospital facility that awaited her in Gauhati.
She’d been told it was primitive, that she’d have to make do until things could be modernized. So in her mind she’d pictured a light bulb on a string, or perhaps old lath and plaster walls. But when she arrived she found she needed to seriously revise her definition of primitive.
The hospital actually had no walls. Just a mere roof with open air sides, except for the surgical suite, where operations were performed by the light of a simple Coleman lantern. The beds were little more than pallets, with minimal screening to keep insects at bay. There was no running water, no electricity, no indoor plumbing of any kind and no septic tank. Yet never did she perceive any of these things as barriers. Not one of those deficiencies could put a chink in Dorothy’s positivity.
November 3, 1928
We arrived in Gauhati on November third and received a warm welcome. I am much in love with the place (not having spent a hot season here) and also with the people. The hospital is very workable—or will be when we get the present plans for running water, septic tanks, and electricity carried out.
I really think that we will have all of these things, and then some, before the rains set in this year. We have just had a property committee here and they have approved the suggestions, and we have the money in the field to carry out these plans.
How naive she’d been thinking all that could be accomplished in a matter of months instead of the three years it had actually taken.
. . . .
Breeching the cultural walls of rural India had proven to be as much of a challenge as carrying on her work in a building undergoing constant change. Cultural taboos, caste boundaries, traditions stringently observed by Hindu, Buddhist and pagan, and a complicated language to learn—those were the things that challenged her to this very day.
January 1929
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