Escorts Pediatric Surgery

Let me first preface this blog with a little bit about my health. I got the worst case of food poisoning on the flight to London (thank you United Airlines). I “purged” 3 times in a 5 hour span at my grandma’s house and then twice on the flight to New Delhi. On the flight, all of the air hostess where very concerned and very accommodating. THANK YOU JET AIRLINES!!!!! Therefore, I was not well the first couple of a days of my visit which prevented me from doing as much as I wanted but I was still able to do several amazing things.

Now, to the good stuff! On my first day in Delhi, I was fortunate enough to have a private tour of Escorts Hospital, the nation’s premier hospital for a multitude of services. This hospital rivals many American hospitals in terms of cleanliness & organizations, and does a far better job in terms of patient care and costs.

The director of the Pediatric Cardio-Thoracic Surgery department is a famous physician named Rajesh Sharma, who has been heavily recruited by Harvard Medical, Johns Hopkins, Stanford University, and many others to practice in America. However, to these various invitations he says, “there are many great physicians in America, my country needs me.” I can only admire Dr. Sharma’s dedication and service to his patients.  Dr. Sharma works 7 days/week, and spends close to 16-18 hours per day at the hospital. He is highly concerned about all of this patients and refuses to let any other physician care for his patients. I have never met a more devoted physician. Oh, did I mention Dr. Sharma is my uncle??? ;-D

I was able to scrub into the operating room to observe in a 3 hour surgery of a VSD and tricuspid valve replacement surgery of an 8 year old patient from South India. After about 20 minutes I needed to sit down so I left the O.R. to get some food, thank god I was surrounded by doctors and nurses who gave me concentrated protein (or at least that’s what I think it was) to give me some energy. After a few minutes, I was able to return to the operating room to finish watching the procedure.

Post-Surgery at Escorts Hospital

Once we were done with the operating room, Dr. Sharma and I visited all of the patients in the ICU, who ranged from 2 weeks to 18 years old. A few of them came from Pakistan and neighboring states of Delhi. Each patient’s diagnosis was presented and the treatment courses was described in detail to me. It seemed as if each patient needed a VSD, which basically means blood is getting diverted from the right side to the left side when it is not supposed to.

Next, we went to speak to two concerned parents. The first was a lady from Pakistan who has a 42 day old son in the ICU. The patient in the simplest sense has his heart’s blood vessels crossed, which is causing blood be sent to the complete opposite side. It is recommended to have the surgery within 15 days of the child’s life if this condition arises, which is the primary concern from this case, the age of the patient. Hopefully, he will be able to adapt and make a full recovery. The second parent was the patient who Dr. Sharma had just operated on. The father had a few questions and was offered housing by the hospital so he can stay close to his son.

After speaking with the parents, we made one more round to the ICU and then went to see Dr. Sharma’s post-op patients. All of the parents and patients worshipped Dr. Sharma for this dedication and commitment to his patients. After rounds, I was EXHAUSTED and tired, due to the fact I was on a liquid diet for 20 hours. So we met up with mom, Kabir (my friend who is also traveling with us) and my aunt. After dinner we were planning to go home to sleep, but Dr. Sharma decided to go back to the hospital to check on his patients once more. I should have expected this, but was shocked he wanted to go back to the hospital after spending close to 15/16 hours there. I hope I can have half the drive he possesses because I know it will last me my entire career!