Starting to see hospitalized patients saved my life.

I can’t count the number of times I thought about quitting during my preclinical years of medical school. But in India, quitting or switching careers felt like suicide. I hated dissecting dead people, pithing living frogs, peering into microscopes, dropping chemicals into a terrified bunny’s eyes. But I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to the medical world, so I slogged on, earned good grades, and eventually reached the clinical part of medical school.

I watch the ceiling lights pass by as I am wheeled to the operating theater. I have made such trips before: Over the 20-odd years I’ve worked here I’ve had an assortment of surgical procedures, ranging from a cholecystectomy to the repair of a half-torn shoulder tendon.

At 4 a.m. on post-op day one, I woke up in the living room recliner, my temporary recovery bed. My dog had his paw on my leg. That’s when I felt it: wetness. I reached down and found blood.

The surgical drains were overflowing. My incision was bleeding. I was beginning to feel lightheaded. As an emergency medicine physician, I knew that this was not normal.

It was a regular duty day at the neonatal ward when I received a frantic call from my intern colleague. “Come quickly,” she said, “We just received a critical case from the OBGY unit.”

I rushed over. She showed me a tiny, fragile newborn—barely alive.

“How far along was the pregnancy?” I asked.

“Twenty-two weeks,” she replied.

The year was 2008, and I was hospitalized for extensive pre-op testing. Awaiting me was a long and risky operation to try to save part of my left kidney. A well-meaning but errant interventional radiologist had ablated it with alcohol. Not just once, but twice!