Brain surgery amid butchery: A doctor’s tale
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette [1]
May 29, 1995
BY PETER ARONSON
Democrat-Gazette Staff Writer
Dr. Kenan Arnautovic appreciates the music at his office more than the other doctors do. For two and a half years he listened to gunfire and explosions as he performed surgery in his native Bosnia. It took some time for Arnautovic and his wife, Sanja, both 35, to adjust to life without the sound of exploding shells. Uncertainty defined their lives in their war-torn homeland.
When the Arnautovics and their 4-year-old daughter, Aska, moved into their Little Rock apartment in August, the doctor had to suppress the urge to move the coffee table up against the window to protect against shelling.
“Here, when I go to work every morning, my wife knows I’m coming home,” he said.
In 1994, Dr. Ossama Al-Mefty, a neurosurgeon at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, asked Arnautovic to bring his family to Little Rock and accept a research fellowship in skull-base surgery.
Arnautovic worked as a neurosurgeon in the Sarajevo University Hospital; his wife was a judge. They led normal lives and planned to buy a house.
“Then we found ourselves in horror,” Arnautovic said. In mid-1992, the Serbs attacked Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which had declared its independence.
The attacking Serb nationalist forces had been the Yugoslav army under the old communist regime of Josip Tito. The Arnautovics had supported the army with taxes all their working lives.
“From this money, they bought the bombs that fell over our heads,” his said.
“We paid for the army that was killing us,” Sanja Arnautovic added.
In May, a month after the Serbian attack began, Sanja Arnautovic took her 22-month-old daughter, a bag of diapers and some clothes for her daughter and joined a convoy heading for to Zagreb, Croatia. Her husband stayed in Sarajevo to work. Kenan Arnautovic would not see his wife or daughter for two years.
The convoy had only gone as far as a Sarajevo suburb when Serb forces stopped them and took the women and children hostage, holding them for three days along the street where they were captured, he said.
“Those were the hardest days of my life,” Arnautovic recalled.
“I worried they’d kill them, they would rape my woman, my daughter,” he said.
‘I thought we would come back in one month’
For the first day, they were kept out on the street. On the second day, residents of that street took the hostages into their homes, though Serb forces had not yet released them.
After the third day, Sanja Arnautovic and her daughter were allowed to continue on to Croatia for what everyone expected would be a short stay. “When we left Sarajevo, I didn’t think it (the separation) would last three years. I thought we would come back in one month,” she said.
Communication came sporadically. Arnautovic learned that his wife and child were safe, but Sanja Arnautovic didn‘t receive a letter from her husband until four months after her arrival in Zagreb.
Meanwhile, conditions deteriorated inside the country.
Arnautovic read his medical books by candlelight, as the electricity was knocked out. He burned clothing and furniture to keep warm. Food became scarce as the siege of Sarajevo dragged on. The neurosurgeon often went to sleep hungry.
Saving lives, but starving
“Sometimes I would operate all night and then I would ask a nurse, ‘Do you have anything to eat?’ and she would say, ‘l’m sorry doctor, there is nothing left.’ The bread had to go to the patients first and then to people’s families,” Arnautovic recalled.
Sanja Arnautovic occasionally sent packages of food to her husband through humanitarian organizations. Some arrived. When they did, Kenan Arnautovic rejoiced.
“You cannot imagine…,” he said, trailing off, choked up. “It was always a surprise to us and a beautiful experience to receive a new package.”
Once, after not having eaten any meat or fish for a year, Arnautovic fell ill from the shock of having the food. At work each day, he took great pride in saving people’s lives, but seeing a young child shot in the face by a sniper filled him with rage.
“I always wondered, ‘Who is looking through the rifle and targeting the head of a kid?’”
Conditions in and around University Hospital worsened. Arnautovic lost two of his nurses, killed at the hospital.
“And one day there was a sound. I went into the room next door,” he said. Two colleagues, neurosurgeons, were dead. “They were in pieces,” he remembered. “The head was over there.”
“So many such experiences,” Arnautovic sighed. “Too much for one brain.”
Before the war, Arnautovic attended a conference on neurosurgery in Hanover, Germany, where he met Al-Mefty, the UAMS neurosurgeon. The two began corresponding. They kept in contact throughout the war.
In 1994, Al-Mefty, worried about his Bosnian colleague’s well-being, arranged for Arnautovic to bring his family to Little Rock.
Warm welcome in U.S.
While Arnautovic works at UAMS, his wife studies English. She hopes to find a job related to law, though she knows she will not be able to practice here.
The couple say the state’s similarity to Bosnia surprised them. Both countries have large nature areas and have cultural and ethnic diversity. And people in Bosnia and Arkansas always look well-groomed, he said.
Sanja Arnautovic didn’t know what to expect in the United States, but she didn’t expect the warm response people have given her family — helping out with their daughter — and the adjustment to life in Arkansas.
“People are so nice to us,” she said.
If they decide to stay in this country longer, Arnautovic may study to practice medicine here. For now, though, they are content with the life they are living.
“This is a beautiful experience in our lives,” Arnautovic said.
Still, they think of home. When Arnautovic sees a light bulb on in his apartment, he remembers having to read by candlelight and appreciates the “miracle” of electricity. When they cook an egg, they make sure not to leave anything inside the shell. Nothing goes to waste.
“Always in my mind is Bosnia,” Arnautovic said. The international community needs to do more, the couple said.
“I am not a politician,” Arnautovic noted. “I am a neurosurgeon, and all of what I am speaking is as a normal citizen of Sarajevo.” But, he said, “The situation in Bosnia could be resolved in one day. Bosnia could be defended as Kuwait was in the (Persian) Gulf War, through military intervention or by lifting the unjustified arms embargo of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is tying our hands.”
“Justice is on the side of Bosnia,” he said. Then, after a sigh, added, “Of course, justice doesn’t always win.”
2009 UPDATE: Kenan and Sanja Arnautovic continued on in the United States. They now live in Memphis, Tennessee, where Dr. Arnautovic practices neurosurgery at the Semmes-Murphy Neurologic & Spine Institute [2] and serves as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Neurosurgery, University of Tennessee in Memphis [3]. They now have a second daughter, Alisa.