Heart Research Month with Dr. Khirwadkar
February is Heart Research Month. We are lucky at the Living Library to have GPs who are willing to share their lived experiences, not only as professionals but as people. The doctor-patient is a particularly vexed position to inhabit, and it takes a certain amount of courage to openly discuss experiences which can expose the vulnerabilities, the person behind the professional.
I want to elevate and applaud Dr. Suresh Khirwadkar for his blog post on his experience as the doctor-patient. In his post, he describes his first experience with pericarditis, beginning with his initial symptoms and tracking his emotional journey through the hospital towards a stable condition. The experience of being a doctor-patient seems to be something of a dirty secret in the healthcare world, where admitting to having a human body and human brain somehow tarnish the image of the Perfect Doctor who could carry the world on their shoulders if need be.
“As a doctor I now realise this is a bit more serious than I initially thought. Most patients with pericarditis usually don’t need any treatment at all, other than some minor pain relief, so to be transferred to the big shiny [hospital] was scary. Of course the ambos downplayed it, but I knew the score. One of the curses of being a doctor-patient.”
Dr. Khirwadkar faced an incredibly fraught experience: with a newborn and an 18-month-old on his hands, an Australian Visa medical to look forward to, and only a few days left of paternity leave, his trip to the GP with “indigestion” became a negotiation of competing needs. Balancing his “patient” identity with a (therapeutic) need to know what was happening, what was wrong with him, required a degree of inhabiting the “doctor” role at times - a tension of identity that seems common among many doctors. I will note that as he described the shortcomings of the publicly-funded NHS, I was reminded of certain idiosyncrasies of Australian hospitals - some of his story may sound familiar to many of you as well.
“It’s funny what our minds do to us when we are unwell.
What I do definitely remember quite vividly though is the total lack of compassion from the attending staff. Neither the doctors nor the nurses took any time to comfort me, to really assure men (other than some platitudes of ‘no you aren’t dying’). Honestly they barely spoke to me.
Here I was dying (I thought at least) and they barely even acknowledged my existence.”
You can read the rest of his experience here, and I do recommend reading all of it - Dr. Khirwadkar writes with alternating self-effacing humour and deadly honestly which perfectly balance the frustration of being a patient with the warmth of understanding. Give it a read.