Chasing Zebras

Margaret Nowaczyk left Communist Poland as a teenager and arrived in Canada with her family, resolved to become Canadian in a sense she was still working out, and equally resolved to practise medicine. Her English at the time came largely from the handful of English books she owned, Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil among them, and that reading shaped the way she spoke and wrote. She went on to medical school at the University of Toronto, trained at Toronto's SickKids hospital, and eventually joined McMaster University Hospital as a clinical geneticist.

The memoir follows her path from the upheaval of leaving Poland and the grind of medical school, through years of living with a mental illness that went undiagnosed for a long time, to her discovery of genetics and the weight of prenatal diagnosis. It also traces her turn toward writing and narrative medicine as a way of making sense of the work. Her account moves between hardship and hard-won achievement, and it returns again and again to the value of being open to others and to oneself.

In closing, Dr. Nowaczyk suggests that life is precious and fragile, astonishing and imperfect, and that the right response is to keep trying.