Part 3 #CareerReflections: Pursuing, thriving in and then quitting hospital based healthcare
(Link to Part 1 , Part 2 of the series)
He collapsed right in front of me!
I saw the caretaker of my apartment, a man in his late 50s, lying on the floor clutching his chest. He was clearly in pain and turning nearly unconscious. With no sign of help around, I and a neighbor rushed him to the nearest hospital, hoping it was nothing serious.
“Severe cardiac arrest! You got him just in time!” exclaimed the emergency care staff.
I stood there, feeling a flood of mixed emotions — relief to see him out of danger; comfort that I had helped design some of the devices that surrounded him in the ER; sadness about what he had to suddenly go through without any prior indication about his underlying ailment, which, if known, could have been managed proactively.
As the pain subsided with medications, they began preparing him for a coronary (cardiac) angioplasty. With some sense of consciousness back, he looked at me from his bed. Through all the clutter around him, he managed to raise his hands over his head, joining them to say, “thank you!”
In that unanticipated moment, I was reminded of what had brought me into this field. Suddenly I seemed to have answers to the long-standing question of “what’s my personal impact in this area of work?”
A part of me felt like I had helped solve the problem of bringing ease of access to healthcare technology, which had first inspired me to pursue this path. The hours spent with practitioners and in the labs back at work suddenly felt more meaningful.
He returned to his outhouse in less than a week but was far from his usual “active” self. His lifestyle had been changed overnight, and it was something he did not seem happy with. I was more concerned about his depression than a potential relapse.
Seeing all this, a part of my mind went into a new direction of thought. I wondered, “how did we not have the slightest clue about the poor man’s health beforehand?” “could we have predicted and prevented this with some system of proactive care?”
Again, this was just the inception of a new thought process. Nothing more at that time. I had witnessed that doctors and care providers could have significantly more impact on healthcare outcomes, far more than what technologists and innovators can by themselves. But I hoped that I would find more to do to improve the same hospital healthcare system.
So, at the end of that year, I wrote about this incident in all my MBA application essays and what I thought I could do further to improve this system. That small trigger I had about a “proactive care system away from hospitals” did not seem significant enough and felt a little too audacious to implement in the resource-constrained Indian healthcare system. I also wrote about my love for innovation, learning and education and that was it.
Little did I know what the next year was going to bring my way.
It is said that nothing motivates a person to think and act differently than a pain point that is experienced personally. I had experienced one (through my mother) while growing up and that had brought me into this field. But in the current situation, it seemed like I did not have one.
But the following year was transformative, in that I had two more personal interactions with this system and they brought a paradigm shift.
(to be continued in Part 4)
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This is Part 3 in a series of posts about my choices leading to pursuing, thriving in and then quitting a career in hospital based healthcare. My hope is to help students and early career professionals understand the value of pursuing meaning over the next most logical thing that should go on one’s resume.
