By Regina Nuzzo

A Doctor’s Devotion

Pediatric oncologist Aziza Shad is on call for her patients 24 hours a day

By Regina Nuzzo

With the help of her Bengali roommate, Shad escaped the village, sneaked onto a hay-filled cattle train car headed for the capital of East Pakistan, and went into hiding. She was eventually rescued by the Pakistani army. Throughout the experience, Shad displayed the same first-things-first attitude that she would later demonstrate to patients facing their own crises. “All I knew was that it was a hurdle I needed to get over, and then things would get better,” she says.

Safely back in her hometown, Shad tried again. She attended Dow Medical College, where she immediately gravitated to pediatrics. “Children are so precious and so giving,” she explains. “One little smile is enough to keep you going through the day.” Shad graduated No. 1 in her class.

During her pediatrics residency in Karachi in the late 1970s, Shad met the fishmonger’s son. Although the majority of children with leukemia in developed nations survived in those days, hardly any such children in Pakistan did. “This bothered me tremendously,” she says. To help kids like these, Shad realized she would need to leave Pakistan for more education.

She started a pediatric residency in London—working double duty, at three hospitals—but then she met a young London-born Pakistani who was a graduate student in political science in Pittsburgh. “He convinced me to marry him and move to the U.S.,” she says with a laugh.

So she did another residency at Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital, in relatively rural central Pennsylvania. In one sense, Shad had become an outsider who looked and sounded different—with a petite frame, a sparkling nose stud, and brisk, Urdu-inflected English—in a town that had encountered few Asians, let alone a young Pakistani woman.

In another sense, Shad had finally found her home. “In Pakistan, we had to see 100 kids a day. We loved them, but we couldn’t give them what they deserved,” she says. The United Kingdom’s nationalized health care meant more resources but also a more hands-off attitude, in which the family wasn’t always given full information. “Then I came here, where the approach is that the child needs to understand at his own level and his own way what’s wrong with him,” she says. “You do it in a gentle, compassionate way.”

After the residency and then six years of research in childhood lymphoma at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Shad joined the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center in 1995. She has been there ever since.

Shad has earned rave reviews from her patients—among whom she counts the entire family, not just the children being treated—for down-to-earth personal care. For example, when Donna Shank was considering moving her son Daniel, then 9, to Lombardi for his leukemia treatment, she was shocked to find herself in the middle of a leisurely two-hour-plus conversation with Shad. “There was no arrogance, no airs, no pretension,” Shank says. “It was like talking to a next-door neighbor.”