MY LETTER OF APOLOGY TO DR.A

Dear Dr. A,

While choosing to keep your name from the world, I beg for your forgiveness that I couldn’t impress you with my ‘temperament'.

When I woke up in the ICU, the first thing I did was crack a joke with my husband. Little did I know how badly timed it was. I did not know what had happened over the past 4 hours while I was unconscious and all hell had broken lose on my family. A C-section that was supposed to last 40 minutes had turned into a life threatening procedure. I had been given 7 bottles of blood and needed more. While I delivered a healthy baby 25 minutes into the surgery, a complication called Placenta Accreta almost took my life.

As I slowly gained more consciousness, I started noticing all the ‘unexpected extras’ attached to my body. I had gone inside with just one branula, I came out with 6 which dotted both my arms over bruised patches. I noticed there was a bloody drain popping out of my stomach, a urine bag dangling next to me, and a weird bunch of catheters were protruding out of my neck. The pain was more than what I had expected. I had undergone a C-Section for my elder daughter 6 years ago so I was confused. And then my doctor came to explain to me what had happened and all that I had lost during that surgery. I was supposed to stay for 2 days in the hospital; that had now been revised to 8. “You can say that your plane crashed but you survived,” he said. And then I struggled to sleep through the night.

The next morning I was woken up by the head nurse in the ICU who asked me if I had walked around. I was so shaken to hear that I was this close to dying that I did not feel I have the power to invest in a walking escapade. I was petrified. I wanted my doctor. I told her I want to wait for him but she gave me a nice scolding. I had a bad shivering attack after that which made my stomach muscles, interlaced with lots of stitches and wounds, quiver. It was painful. Without the AC or the fan it took 3 blankets and 20 minutes to settle. Thank you sister for the early morning present.

Then, thankfully, my doctor came, we had another talk. He made me sit up, which was quite an exercise for me, both mentally and physically. As soon as he left, the physiotherapist came and made me do some more exercises. In the middle of all this I was being pumped with drips and injections and a lab assistant was drawing a blood sample. I was drained. And then you came – to change my dressing.

You pulled the tapes off my skin as if you have no concept of pain. You pressed on the dressing harder than you should have. My stitches and wounds were tender and you hurt me. Yes, you couldn’t have done anything about the pain resulting from the surgery but you could have been gentle. And after you rattled my broken stomach and subjected me to your mean, rude, insensitive demeanor, Dr.S, the Mighty, came. I needed a break, just a moment to stop talking, for it to stop hurting, for me to catch some air. Dr.S started with her tassalli and I covered my eyes to stop my tears. I requested her that I don’t want to discuss what had happened. Her reply was that she wasn’t here for social service; she was here at the request of another senior doctor. When a hurting patient in the ICU asks the doctor for a moment, is that the reply a ‘senior’ doctor is supposed to give? I started panting, trying to catch my breath, I started getting the painful shivering attack again, but she wouldn’t stop her rant. My husband and sister asked her to step out, my condition quite evident, but her ego had been hurt. A nurse stepped in to put the oxygen mask on my face but apparently ‘senior’ doctors are supposed to be blind to everything but their own inflated sense of self. She continued arguing with my husband about how she was there on request and was not being treated with respect.

Finally she stormed out. After the whole hue and cry had happened, you told my husband “Itni senior doctor theen, inhon ne ehsaan kiya hai aap par yahan aa kar, laikin aapkey patient ka temperament bohat kharab hai.” Patient ka ‘temperament’? Dr.A, you are a woman. Do you know what it is like for a woman to lose what I had lost? You had obviously read my file and you knew. Do you know what it feels like when you know you were this close to never waking up again? Do you know what it feels like to imagine the news of your death being broken to your 6 year old daughter? Do you know what a mother feels like when she knows she was this close to never seeing her new born, never knowing her? What it feels like to imagine there was a possibility your babies would have had to grow up without your lap, without your love? To imagine what your husband would do with those 2 kids, how would he fill the void of a missing mother? To imagine what your parents would go through to learn that their 33 year old daughter didn’t make it in the operation theatre? Do you have a family? Do you have people around you that love you, who you never want to see cry? What sort of a ‘temperament’ would you have displayed if you were in my shoes? Have you become this callous because you cut people up every day and their pain is just routine for you? Or perhaps you missed all those lectures where your professors taught your batch mates how important it is for a doctor to be compassionate in addition to being skillful.

I want to know why it was MY job to smile and be nice to you while I was going through the biggest turmoil of my life. It hadn’t even been a day. I want to know why I was supposed to salute Dr.S and feed her ego when I was going through agonizing pain. Why was it not okay if I didn’t want to talk? How dare you tell my husband who, less than 24 hours ago was trying to figure out what to do with my babies in case of bad news, that he needs to manage my ‘temperament’? Why is the coming of a doctor to see a patient an ehsaan? Isn’t it their job? Don’t you become a doctor because you want to help people? Well, you cannot cure people when you don’t even have 2 nice words to say, when you don’t even know how to change a dressing with a light hand, when you don’t even understand that surgeries, specially that take a patient close to death, can be traumatic for normal people. I am still dealing with the trauma, I still cry when I imagine my eldest learning that mama will never come home.

Just learning how to cut and then stitch people up doesn’t make you a doctor. You need to know how to heal people. You are lucky to be working in the hospital you are in. If you need lessons on how to heal patients and be a real doctor, learn from Dr. Tajammul who has a sea of compassion in him, who has done and is doing all that he can to pull me out of this.  Learn from Dr. Gardezi, whose entrance through the door made me feel like everything will be okay. Observe Dr.Kamran as he knows how to be firm yet kind and warm. Learn from Rizwana, Mehwish, Sonia and Naureen, nurses in the ICU, who held my hand through all my blood tests and cleaned up my mess, each time with a smile.

Smile a little for your patients, Dr.A, it won’t cost you a cent. Understand them rather than expecting them to give you protocol. They say mareez ki duaein zaroor lagti hai, you never know when you may need them. Shifa deynay wala Allah hai, magar waseela aap hein. Dil naram kar ke waseela banein. Perhaps, you need to revisit why you chose to become a doctor.

Once again, I am deeply sorry, that a day after the most traumatic, shocking and scary experience of my life, I wasn’t able to welcome you with the ‘temperament’ that was agreeable for you.

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