Change in course

“It was just a tickle-fight,” Amani said about the event that changed her life. “Silly, really. Just playing like when we were kids.”

Amani’s older sister, Ashaki, also attended Amherst, and one night they were lightheartedly kidding around in the dorm room they shared.

Amani lost her balance and fell back on the twin bed, bumping her head against the painted cement block wall. The tickling stopped as they both dissolved into laughter.

Amani rubbed her sore head.

I’m going to have a bump, she exclaimed as she gave her sister a mischievous smile.

But over the next few hours, Amani developed startling symptoms. Her speech slurred; her body trembled; she was overcome with fatigue. Alarmed, Ashaki called 911 and Amani was admitted for observation. But the ER physician brushed her concerns aside. After all, she was a young woman, and it was just a bump, he said. With a little rest, she’d be fine.

Eventually her symptoms lessened, but they did not completely subside. Frustrated, Amani consulted other specialists, but no abnormalities showed up on MRI or CT scans. One neurologist diagnosed her with essential tremor, a neurological disorder, often hereditary, that causes trembling.

Have a glass of wine! he said as he sent her on her way.

Appalled, discouraged and too young to drink, Amani learned to adjust to the weakness on the right side of her body, the crick in her neck, the perpetual fatigue.

It was not enough to deter her from falling in love. Amani became engaged to her college sweetheart, Lionel Legagneur, and after she graduated Amherst in 1997, she headed to Cambridge, Mass., where he was enrolled in Harvard Law School. During a gap year between college and medical school, Amani took a job as a biomedical researcher at Massachusetts General, where she worked on a clinical research study for Women with AIDS wasting syndrome.

The job made a tiny crack in her resolve to be a doctor. All the charts and blood samples and treatment plans aimed at alleviating the women’s suffering didn’t seem to help as much as sitting and holding their hands and listening to them. So Amani sat, held and listened.

Relationships were important, she realized. But more than science?

One day Amani looked up from her computer and her gaze through the apartment window fell on the castle-like entrance to Harvard Divinity School just beyond the law school where Lionel was studying. Curious, she researched it online and, in an instance of serendipity, walked across the campus, through the castle doors and changed her career path.

Amani told herself she was just taking a break from a future in medicine when she enrolled in the Master of Divinity program.

“Coming from a science background and a denomination that does not fully ordain women, I had no idea what I would do with a divinity degree,” she said. Still, she was compelled to pursue it.

Then, a year and a half into divinity school and mere months after her wedding to Lionel, the symptoms that first surfaced at Amherst returned with a vengeance. She was in the middle of a conversation when it struck.

“It felt like something broke in my head,” Amani said. She was overcome by a blinding migraine.

It so happened that Ashaki, who was well into her medical school studies at the time, was scheduled for a visit that very day. She was alarmed by her sister’s listing gait, right-sided weakness and profound speech impairment. Suspecting a mini stroke, she rushed Amani to the ER.

Again a doctor made light of Amani’s symptoms, blithely surmising the root of her problems was grad school anxiety.

Amani was close to despair. She continued to pursue her degree for a while, navigating the bumpy, cobbled paths of Cambridge in her wheelchair. But it eventually became too much. Shortly after her encounter with the girl who “took up so much sky” in Harvard Square, Amani withdrew for the semester.

Facing fear head-on

Trailing colorful scarves and sparkling with a bold array of jewelry, Amani cuts a striking figure at Northside Hospital. As head of the hospital’s Spiritual Health and Education department and a supervisor of the clinical pastoral education program, she spends long hours in meetings and mired in paperwork, managing the institution’s chaplains.

But she still makes time for her favorite part of the job: interacting with others, be it hospital staff, chaplains or patients.

Touch is an important part of her ministry; she sees it as a healing tool. One day she visited with an anxious patient whose fingers were to be amputated the next morning. Amani held the woman’s hands as she gave a blessing, honoring the woman’s fingers for the dough they had lovingly kneaded into bread, the paintbrushes they’d artfully stroked against canvas, the children’s cheeks they had caressed, the hot pink nail polish they’d often sported. The patient was radiant when Amani was done, visibly more peaceful with what lay ahead.

Amani believes the distinction between healing and making the lame walk or the deaf hear is an important one.

“Everyone that Jesus healed died eventually,” she said. “But that’s not the point. Those who were healed knew that God was with them, that they were worthy of love and healing. They had a chance to accept peace and a more abundant life from a divine source.”

Her own medical struggles have made her a compassionate healer. She is aware of her own vulnerabilities, and she instantly recognizes them in others.

Have you ever considered a surrogate?

The doctor’s question was a reasonable one. Having a baby could be dangerous for Amani. The whole process, especially labor, might send her blood pressure sky-high, might further stress her fragile brain, might trigger those symptoms that put her in a wheelchair so many years ago.

It was an unnecessary risk.

Lionel left the decision up to Amani.

“I always told her I would love her whether or not we had a child,” he said.

Despite all the things that could have gone wrong, Amani persevered, relying on her doctors to guide her though a high-risk pregnancy. Every day she had to give herself a shot of blood thinner in the abdomen in an attempt to keep her baby safe.

She also relied on her faith.

“I do not control the outcome of my prayers,” she said. “I just stay in relationship with God. I do what I can, and leave the rest to God.”

Her daughter Zuri was born three weeks early. Both mother and child came through it safely.

Now 6, Zuri is proof that Amani refuses to live in fear.

“Do I fear an untimely death? That I won’t live long enough to finish my work and see my daughter grow?” Amani reflected one day, seated on the sofa in her office at Northside Hospital surrounded by art, religious imagery and crayon drawings by her daughter.

“That would be debilitating. I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed.”

She paused for a moment and gazed out the window.

“I still get afraid,” she said softly, “but I don’t live afraid.”

Outside, the sun was shining. The light fell on her face and she smiled like someone who knows there is enough sky for her and everyone else.