A pharmacist who gave up her career to support her severely autistic son before enduring a difficult divorce has said “impossible doesn’t exist” after successfully pursuing her lifelong dream to study medicine aged 35.
Dr Ros Jabar, 51, who lives in Cardiff, Wales, worked as a pharmacist from 1997 and said she was the “breadwinner” in her semi-arranged first marriage, earning about £65,000 annually to support her family, including her son Jamil, now 22, who was nonverbal at the time due to his severe autism, and daughter Yasmin, 21.
While Ros was able to provide for her family, she claims she was called “a bad woman and a bad wife” as she did not want to be the “traditional” stay-at-home mother.
Struggling in her unhappy marriage and with her son’s autism, and facing criticism for her work-life balance, she ended up quitting her job as a pharmacist and later placed Jamil in a special needs school – but she had always dreamed of becoming a doctor.
In order to pay the bills, look after her children, and secure some funds to pay for university, she opened a cafe called Jabar’s Hut – a name inspired by Star Wars’ Jabba the Hutt and her surname – which was a “roaring success”, and she then got a place at Cardiff University’s School of Medicine, aged 35.
Now, more than a decade after completing her degree, Ros is working part-time as a polytrauma doctor and has become a successful aesthetics professional with a high-profile clinic in Cardiff, and she has found love with her new partner Saj, 60, and had two more children: Soren, four, and Isaak, two.
After overcoming so many obstacles, Ros said “impossible doesn’t exist in her repertoire” as there is “no law on Earth saying you can’t do it”.
“I think they were all expecting a little, quiet, gentle Asian lady, with not much fire behind her, but they got what we call in my culture, my language, Maheena Thalijara Pathan,” she said.
“Maheena means smooth, Thalijara means noble, and Pathan means warrior.
“I looked at everything in front of me and I thought, ‘I want to be a businesswoman, so I’m going to be a businesswoman. I want to be a doctor, so I’m going to be a doctor’.”
Ros studied pharmacy at De Montfort University in Leicester before starting her job as a locum pharmacist in 1997.
She then got married in 1999 before having two children, Jamil and Yasmin.
“I was working as a locum pharmacist for a while, supporting my little family – and I found out very early on that my son had a severe form of autism,” Ros said.
“The communication was zero, his sensory perceptions and his sensory function were non-existent, so he really needed a little bit of specialist care.”
Ros felt “guilty” being a working mother, but she was career-driven and wanted to provide for her family.
However, she said the lack of support from her ex-husband led to her quitting her job before the marriage eventually broke down.
“I was looking after everything, looking after everyone, doing the bills, being the wife – you name it, I did it,” Ros said.
Being then unemployed, Ros spent her days looking after her two children, taking them to school and the park, but she said she was “bored out of her mind”.
This is when she decided to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor – but she had to find the funds to pay for university and retake her A-Levels to improve her chances.
“In the background, I had a little plan going in my head, because when you have children, you have no choice – you are driven to look for solutions constantly,” Ros said.
“I think women are in this constant state of flux when they have a child; all they want to look at is how they protect that child and keep that child in a safe place.
“But I remember this particular doctor saying to me, ‘You are wasted as a pharmacist, you would really make a great doctor because you have a way of chatting to people’.”
Ros begged her local council to allow her to open a small cafe outside the museum in Cardiff, which would later be called Jabar’s Hut, serving a fusion of Indian and Italian homemade foods and coffee, and she re-took her A-Levels in that same year in 2004, ending up with all A* or A grades.
After securing enough money to pay for her first year of university, she battled to obtain her place at Cardiff University, but she was mocked and faced with constant rejection.
She went to a careers fair and spoke to a Cardiff University ENT consultant, explaining how she had “always wanted to be a doctor”, and he said: “I’ll eat my hat if you get an interview.”
Ros said she was “heartbroken”, but little did that consultant know that he would later end up interviewing Ros, and she secured a place at the university to study medicine in 2007.
“It was the most surreal experience,” Ros said.
“I cannot tell you, that news was the best news ever – and I thought, I’m going to become a doctor.”
Ros said her ex-husband left her on the day she started her five-year degree, but looking back now, she feels “it was the best thing he could have done”.
She applied for a pharmacy licence while studying, in order to obtain some additional funds as she had gone from “earning a beautiful £65,000 a year in those days to nothing”.
With the help of Saj, who was just a friend at the time, she then opened a local pharmacy in 2009, which provided an income of £80 a week to support herself and her two children.
She and her ex-husband finalised their divorce in 2010, and after graduating in 2012, then undertook some courses in aesthetics, specifically Botox and dermal fillers.
She sold the pharmacy for about £350,000 in 2014, allowing her to renovate her home and live off those earnings before she opened her own clinic, Ros Medics, in Cardiff, in 2015.
She later began working part-time as a polytrauma doctor at the University Hospital of Wales, allowing her to “bring the two worlds together” – jobs she “absolutely loves”.
Ros hopes to empower other women and has even set up her own training programme, called Calla Aesthetics Training, which aims to educate medics and non-medics to become aesthetic practitioners at the highest level.
Ros has overcome so many obstacles, but she said “her passion is making people feel good and supported” and she would describe herself as a “warrior” as she has had to fight for her success.
