IT TAKES A LIFETIME: Retired doctor has seen happiness and tragedy

Dr. Siamak Shahriari started his career with a doctorate in physical chemistry, but he soon changed direction and entered medical school. Obstetrics and gynecology was the right field for him, he says. “Where else can you be the first person to touch a new life?” Shahriari says.
(Special to the Democrat-Gazette)
Dr. Siamak Shahriari started his career with a doctorate in physical chemistry, but he soon changed direction and entered medical school. Obstetrics and gynecology was the right field for him, he says. “Where else can you be the first person to touch a new life?” Shahriari says. (Special to the Democrat-Gazette)


Dr. Siamak Shahriari studied chemistry and then medicine, and he found the formula for his happiness was in living for others.

Shahriari, 79, retired in 2019 after almost 40 years of taking calls from patients and delivering babies at all hours of the day and night in the Blytheville area, followed by a 3-year stint as professor and physician at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.

He doesn't regret all the after-hours conversations and visits.

"A person who lives for themselves, they will have a limited life -- I don't care how rich or how poor they are," he says. "Everybody should widen their capacity and live for other folks. That's what medicine did for me and I really enjoyed it."

Now that his time is his own, he has found other ways to connect with people.

"I am focusing on a few things, mostly writing and painting, bottom line, just doing what I want to do," he says.

One of his watercolors captures a scene from a chili supper in Blytheville -- one woman ladling chili from a big stainless-steel pot and another engaged in conversation with someone out of the frame. The images are detailed, down to the label on a ketchup bottle and hand gestures of people chatting in the background. Other paintings feature an empty ornate cowboy boot, its toe pierced by the stilettoed heel of a woman with bright red toenails, and an eagle eyeing a robin perched on a wooden privacy fence. Shahriari's wife, Mahnaz -- who he calls his "lady superior" and, in jest, "she who must be obeyed" -- also is frequently his muse.

Shahriari has a doctorate in physical chemistry and started his career researching small atmospheric particles in Rolla, Mo.

"You know, pollutants and otherwise," he says. "I spent about a year and a half there working, and then I woke up in the morning and I said I wanted to do something else. I went to medical school."

After medical school at the University of Missouri at Columbia, he did a residency in California. That's where he met and married Mahnaz, there from her home in Germany to visit her sister and brother-in-law, friends of Shahriari's.

Shahriari and his wife left California's traffic jams behind for rural Arkansas, settling in Blytheville.

"It took about five minutes to drive from my home to the office," he says. "It turned out to be a very excellent little town. George Bush Sr. talked about a kinder, gentler America and I found that kinder, gentler America in Blytheville, Ark."

In Blytheville, he volunteered to read in classrooms and sponsored a writing contest for the public school district. In retirement, he writes down stories about his life.

"It's for my kids. I feel like a lot of children don't know their parents, and a lot of parents don't know their children well enough. I think that connection is important," he says. "I write about what I did when I was growing up and all that so hopefully they go, 'OK, that's my dad,' who was in the beginning this all-powerful guy, who tells them what to do and orders them around, and I just want them to know that there is always humanity, both in parents and children."

Shahriari was born in Iran, a place he hasn't revisited since leaving with his family in 1960.

His father worked for the American Embassy.

"He was a liaison, I think, between the two governments," Shahriari says. "He was at the embassy and he had a lot of American friends."

Shahriari was in high school when the family moved to New York, where he needed time to adjust to a new culture and become fluent in the native language.

"I was very good in math and science and they gave me special advanced classes for the science," he says. "I lagged behind in English but I started reading books and dictionaries and that really made a difference."

He had an uncle who was a doctor, but it wasn't that man who inspired him to study medicine. That was a big, burly Irish surgeon who repaired his injured back when he was working as a PhD scientist.

"I spent a good month in pain," he says. "They laid me down and operated on me and it was a successful operation and within a few days I no longer had that pain and I could walk around. I really felt like a new person. That was more of an influence in my going into medicine than any other recommendation or suggestion."

It was the right choice for him, he says.

"Medicine was extremely rewarding. I was in a specialty where I could see parents being most excited when their baby was born, and unfortunately I've seen folks die. I've been at the top of pleasure and love and I've experienced that, and I've also been at the bottom of tragedies," he says. "I've had a full life and enjoyed almost every minute of it. If I had to, if the good Lord wants me to do it all again, I would do it all again."

If you know an interesting story about an Arkansan 70 or older, please call (501) 425-7228 or email:

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  photo  Dr. Siamak Shahriari retired in 2019 from a long career of delivering babies, mostly in Blytheville. He moved to Little Rock in 2016 to work as a physician and professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Shahriari created this painting of a mother and child to hang in his Blytheville office. “I always wanted to paint, I always wanted to write, but most of my life, I felt, belonged to other folks,” Shahriari says. (Special to the Democrat-Gazette)

 
 


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