By Lubab al-Quraishi April 9, 2021Reprints
Adobe
When people ask if they should call me “doctor,” I’ve always answered, “Please, call me Lubab.”
Titles don’t matter to me. But what
does matter to me is for America to acknowledge my medical training and the skills I honed as a physician in Iraq and to let me work here as a doctor, especially after having toiled on the frontlines of Covid-19 care alongside thousands of other foreign-trained health professionals: physicians, nurses, medical assistants, and others.
We helped saved countless lives.
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After graduating ninth in my class of 300 at Baghdad College of Medicine, I worked as a licensed pathologist for a decade in Iraq’s capital city. My family and I had to flee when death squads tried to kill us. At the time, I didn’t know where we would end up. When we arrived in the U.S. in 2014, I thought that it wouldn’t take long for me to qualify to work as a physician.