Shorewood’s Dr. Ndidiamaka Musa, a cardiac intensive care specialist at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, says becoming a doctor was a childhood dream, and her love of children made pediatrics a natural choice.

A baby’s heart is about the size of a walnut. Usually it is a model of perfection, but sometimes not. Some of the babies with those tiny, sick hearts find themselves in the capable, caring hands of Dr. Ndidiamaka Musa, a cardiac intensive care specialist at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin. Most likely, they and their grateful parents will never know her fascinating life story.

For the last four years she has lived in Shorewood with her husband, David, and their three children, ages 9, 11 and 17. On Saturdays you’re apt to find her shuttling back and forth to her children’s soccer games, just like any other family.

Her parents, siblings and family history are not like any other, though. Her father is from Nigeria and her mother is from Sierra Leone; she was born in Chicago. In her family, it turns out, everyone is brilliant and highly educated — characteristics at which she smiles and shrugs her shoulders. "When I was born, my mother was in Chicago working on her master’s degree and my dad, who was in the Nigerian Foreign Mission, was in London at the time. So, my first trip was to London where we lived till he was posted to India but decided not to go and we returned instead to Nigeria." Her siblings include a sister with a Ph.D. in mathematics who currently lives in New York and two brothers currently living in Nigeria, one of whom is a civil engineer and the other an architect.

The family’s return to Enugu, Nigeria, would coincide with what the world came to know as the Biafran War in the early 1970s. Those were difficult times, and Musa recalls that her family, like many others, buried valuables in the yard to keep them from being looted by soldiers. "My mother was helping the Red Cross work with refugees and my maternal grandmother cared for us kids. Eventually, Grandmother insisted she wanted to go home to Sierra Leone and take everyone with her." At the age of 7, Musa and her family did so, with the exception of her father, who stayed on to help Nigeria in whatever way he could. The family lost everything when it left.

Musa spent the next several years going to school in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where she attended primary, secondary, advanced level and college. She attended Dogliott Medical College at the University of Liberia.

"Becoming a doctor was a childhood dream," Musa says. "As a little girl, I had a lady doctor I really admired and I always wanted to help people.

"I went into pediatric intensive care because I love kids," she says. "I could get bored easily with a conventional practice, but I thrive on the challenge of thinking quickly. Cardiovascular care is very intense. It is intervention-led. I always have to consider what will any one thing do to the whole system."

Musa treats children up to 18 years of age. When a child comes to her, they are very sick indeed. How does she get through crisis after crisis, year after year? "I have to stay calm and focused. I rely on my training and I have to think on my feet. In this specialty, it is necessary to rise to the occasion. We all work as a team. Only afterwards am I able to sit down and reflect."

The slight accent heard in her perfect English is from her second language Krio or Creole. "My mom belongs to a tribe formed from North American freed slaves from Nova Scotia to Jamaica who were returned to Africa. Creole is a mixture of English, African and Portuguese. But my first language is English and it is the language used in the school system. My parents always emphasized education with us." Her mother emphasized it with a lot of other girls, too, when she became the principal of Annie Walsh Memorial School, the oldest girls’ school south of the Sahara.

Sierra Leone literally translated means Lion Mountains, a bit odd because the highest point in the country is not quite 2,000 feet above sea level. Freetown, where Musa grew up, is directly on the coast. It is a difficult country to live in with its tropical climate and a rainy season lasting from May to December. During the dry season the harmattan winds blow sandstorms down from the Sahara desert. About the size of South Carolina, the country is rich in mineral deposits, including diamonds and gold, but political problems have dogged its ability to rise above poverty for the majority of its population, which numbers about 6 million.

Musa loves to read and is well versed in the works of writers with international stature who have also surmounted the often harsh life in West Africa. She’s read the Nigerian Wole Soyinka who won the Nobel Prize for his drama and Chinua Achebe, also Nigerian, who is considered the father of the African novel. In fact, during secondary school, one of her fellow students was Achebe’s daughter. "She was a class behind me; yes, I have seen her father on the school grounds."

In 1987, she and her husband came to the United States. Musa took all the requisite exams and began her pediatric residency at the University of Chicago specializing in critical care. From there she went to Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis for five years and then to Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin four years ago. She’s also an assistant professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome (the left side including aorta, aortic valve, left ventricle and mitral valve is underdeveloped) is another of her specialties in addition to cardiac intensive care. Husband David has a Ph.D. in theology and is an adjunct professor at Carthage College.

Africa remains very much on her mind and her actions prove it. Just this year she was in Sierra Leone and recently in Ghana and Senegal. She travels with other physicians, nurses and medicine. On one such trip, she recalls setting up tables outside a community center; she and three physicians proceeded to see 1,500 people in the next four days.

Having personally fended off a breast cancer diagnosis, she is concerned about the high incidence of the disease in Africa. Her recent trip to Sierra Leone with Mequon resident Dr. Alonzo Walker, a breast cancer specialist and professor of surgery at the Medical College of Wisconsin, was related to this. "They have an increasing awareness of breast cancer where usually the diagnosis is too late. Everyone there nurses their babies, but they are also learning that this does not prevent the disease. In a country like Sierra Leone, lots of people are trained in health care, but the brain drain from Africa is very large."