The doctor lives for those he/she serves.
The patient is at the centre of all we do.
The patient powers our victories, and anchors our defeats.
A doctor is called good only because the health of patients reflects one’s expertise.
A hospital has a good name because the people who go there, when they need help, have something good to say when they leave.
A health care system which puts a patient at the centre of its best service will not fail.
It may flounder, it may totter, but it will always survive as long as the people that are served are kept in good health.
True vulnerability
I have always tried to go the extra mile for my patients.
Maybe it’s because I have been a patient many times before.
Maybe it's an in-person knowledge of what true vulnerability means, and how disease can very quickly cut away the treasured elements of our humanity. Illness dehumanises.
Medical training is a 6/7 year journey of exploration of this process, and laboured imbibition of the strategies that reverse it.
Medical school itself is the ultimate crucible.
It is a cauldron of refinement that takes the student through a slow boil of enlightenment, with the promise to give the chance to jump out when the kitchen is hot.
But this promise is fake; usually there will be no clear chance.
And most of the humans crazy enough to choose this path in the first place would rather be dragged out kicking and screaming than jump out.
Maybe that is why doctors still thrive in Ghana, especially when the ideals that we are trained on in school are very different from the foundations that our healthcare system towers on.
Reality
In the real Ghana, the patient is not the centre.
There are so many other components in a system that is under-resourced, under-staffed and under-motivated that crowd out the supposed centrepiece.
And in a system where the patient is not centred, it is difficult for the doctor to be treated the same.
Sometimes, our standing in society, our uniqueness, the fact that so many were academically exemplary, may give some false sense of security, but in the long run reality hits.
The health of the individual is right at the bottom of the pyramid of priorities.
In a country where the average funeral home makes more money than the average hospital, sometimes it seems like death looms larger than life in the scheme of things.
I have never lost more than I have gained in standing for my patient.
Some of the greatest blessings of my life have come from pushing when I am tired, smiling when I am sorrowful, driving when I am broken.
And as new students start their journeys in medical school this quarter, this is a truth that I most want to share.
In medical school, you will push for yourself, and learn to push for your colleagues.
In the world, you will have to learn how to push for your patient, and not give up on yourself and your colleagues.
It is in this striving that you will find your purpose.
It is in the depths of your empathy for their suffering that you will find your calling.
It is in the grateful smile of the one for whom you did all the right things that you will find the courage to pick yourself up when you got the pathology completely wrong for another.
The patient is the reason for our hustle.
