Life is so unpredictable, it gave me a big jolt in a matter of 15days and brought me down to reality…….directly telling me who is the boss here. It showed me its true colour of an angel and that of the death King- waiting to take you away the next moment without prior notice or warning.

On the eve of his 44th birthday, a friend of mine was travelling from Mumbai to Pune and had just stepped out of his punctured ride to help the driver change the tyre when a speeding bus bumped him and took him away from all of us. This was as if Death was just waiting for him at that juncture without him totally unaware of his destiny the next moment. We were going to share the Dias in Akola with me talking on current scenario and he on the Future of Spine Surgery. When it’s time…..no one can save us. This is so true and we see this day in and day out in ICUs where if the patient is saved the medical science takes all the credit or think its a miracle and if lost its destiny. There is more than this, there is definitely a superpower which controls what, how, why and when our role as an individual is done and when it’s our time to make an exit. This is proven in multiple accounts, the innumerable lives that are saved or lost in natural calamities, fire, train or road accidents, mishaps where people died at the next moment without them being totally aware and kids and infants saved after a month stucked in the debris. I’m humbled and bow down to this Super power.

Had a similar humbling experience, when I got a frantic call from my hospital, that one of my pre-operative is gasping for air and she is pulseless. She is a young 30y old who took a shower and while inserting an intravenous line as a normal preoperative procedure to hydrate a starving patient developed severe shock and started gasping for breath of air and she was pulseless with BP dropping sharply to 50 systolic. My Aneasthetist or me would have taken 7-8min to reach the hospital, the on duty doctor did his job by holding a mask and Ambu bag. There was an angel who was walking the stairs and was there with the patient in few seconds. He was there to assess the patient before the surgery and give fitness for surgery. He missed the patient last night in the long rush and was finishing his left job today morning. He is a very busy Intensivist at a corporate hospital in town. He was “God-send”, an angel who saw the patient and immediately intubated the patient, shifted her to ICU in his care and within 12hrs the patient was out of danger. In a day she was extubated and within 48hrs she was out of ICU and with her family, totally unaware of what had happened to her and what her debilitated, critical position made effect on us. We the doctors are still scratching our head to find the cause of the sudden drop of her pulse and BP and the miraculous escape of this woman from the jaw of death, with the angel holding her hand at the right time and bringing her out unscratched and unaware. As it was not her time yet.

I as a doctor strongly believe with my experiences that I’m just a mediator between my patients and the Superpower who decides the success and failure of my deeds and I humbly bow down to HER/HIM. My teacher Dr Manu Kothari use to always quote Ambriose Pare- We Suture, HE heals ????.