I was a four-year-old kid when I was about to begin my first day of
school. I was born and raised 20 kilometers away from the big city in a
small rural area with minimal essential amenities — for example,
schools, roads, and hospitals. Like all other kids, it was a momentous
occasion for me to start my first day of school, and I remember how
exciting it was.
As I started to attend regular classes and enjoyed participating in
different sports activity, I began to have shortness of breath with
little exertion, cough and recurrent chest infections that only would
decrease after taking antibiotics. My father took me to a local doctor
who took detail history and examined me. After that, he told my father
that he could hear an abnormal heart sound in my chest which may suggest
a heart illness requiring further evaluation by a cardiologist.
Although I was not able to understand what the doctor told my father,
for the first time, I could see him anxious and realized that was a
worrisome situation for me.
A few days later, my parents brought me to a cardiologist, after
traveling for 250 kilometers, in the capital city of Bangladesh. The
cardiologist interviewed us, listened to my heart and investigated
further. It was a disaster for my parents when the reports came, and
doctors said that: “Your son has a hole (VSD) in the heart that needs
regular follow-up until it closes off spontaneously or becomes large
enough to necessitate fixing it with open heart surgery.”
That’s where it began. Starting with a congenital heart disease,
regular follow-up for years, traveling from home to the capital city to
meet doctors, waiting in the long queue for an appointment, missing
school days. The time finally came when the doctor advised that I needed
to undergo open heart surgery. I was eight and could understand that I
needed a major surgery, but my parents were completely lost in a
conundrum of whether to undergo surgery or to seek a second opinion
outside of the country. The decision to go outside of the country for
the second opinion was complicated by the financial constraints, my
educational interference and long travel time.
Finally, we started our journey to Kolkata which is about 700
kilometers from our hometown in Bangladesh to consult another
cardiologist named Dr. G.
Dr. G asked about my problems, and while describing it, I was
terrified. He did an ECHO on me, he was astonished and had a talk with
his colleague.
Dr. G was silent for a while before talking to us. With a deep
breath, he surprisingly told me that, “You don’t have a hole in the
heart, but have a rare kind of congenital heart disease where a membrane
dangling below the aortic valve (termed subaortic stenosis). It is
obstructing your ventricular outflow tract which requires an open heart
surgery eventually. We shall wait until the age of maturity. Doing it
before that has a high recurrence rate.” He asked us for a regular
annual follow up without prescribing any medicines and restricted me to
do only non-exertional activities.
This was the beginning of the long stressful journey where we had to
travel all the way to India with difficult travel conditions every year
to get a follow-up after multiple waiting times. It had an impact on my
family, my education and our emotional pain. I continued to travel to
India for more than 15 years. During this time I carefully observed how
other patients were dealing with the same stress — shifting between
various experts of respective fields and desperately seeking answers to
the cause of the problems. I also saw that how certain patients were
developing complications, especially people from outlying areas for some
it takes days to get to a doctor and they cannot afford this additional
expense, and some people are not aware of how to take care of their
health.
While touching my back, my doctor reassured that: “Everything will be
right, have the courage we will provide you the best care, and your
surgery is not a very major operation.” This was the moment I felt is
worth living for my family, myself and for the community I live in.
These circumstances strongly influenced me to get into medical school
and fortunately, I am lucky enough to study medicine.
During third year of medical school, my doctor a cardiac surgeon
named Dr. DPS told that we need to do this surgery soon because of
severe transvalvular aortic pressure. We took our time to manage the
cost of the surgery and also took into consideration an unexpected
education gap from my medical school. Finally, after a decade of the
stressful journey, my operation was done successfully.
During this journey, I realized the importance of love, compassion,
touch, and empathy. Now whenever I clerk any patient in the hospital and
during my BMJ elective in India, I look at them and realize: “Yes, I
know how it feels to be a patient and what patient might be expecting
from me like I realized being a patient once.” I can make a connection
of empathy and love with the patients and can understand that within
every human being there is a physician inside who knows only to love and
care humanity.
As Hippocrates said, “Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.”
With the perspective of being a patient and a medical student, when I
will become a doctor I would love to serve the community and deliver a
cost-effective, evidence-based care to prevent patients from going into
poverty so that they can say leading a stress free life, and prevent
travelling distant places between multiple health care professionals.
Vivek Podder is a medical student.
This was originally published on KevinMD
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