That friendly doctor

Medical students are lowest down the food chain in the ward. The hospital staff are always busy attending to the patients and rarely pay heed to our presence. Yet, I have to say that some of them can be very mean at times. They never hesitate to greet us with smiles that convey derision and answer our questions in a belligerent manner.

So, I was very glad when Dr. W actually took the initiative to talk to us and teach us things we didn’t know. He’s a house officer in the Department of Orthopaedics then.

There’s once he helped us get the permission from the specialist in the minor operating theatre so that we could enter to observe the procedure. He showed me the sunburst appearance of the streaks of new bone radiating outwards from the cortex on the X-ray film of the patient’s wrist with osteosarcoma ( the commonest primary bone malignancy). And that’s the first sunburst appearance I’d ever seen in my life. I also remember he helped me with the clerking of an unfriendly patient with lumbar spondylosis.

He’s small in size and sort of adorable. Well, apparently, he wasn’t as knowledgeable and formidably intelligent as Dr. Edmond. However, I was very fond of the former due to his humility and friendliness. I guess the last time we met was when we went to see him to have the remaining empty spaces in our logbooks signed the week before our exam.

If you guys had been reading the news, you’d have heard about 3 house officers who perished in a tragic car accident on the Land below the Wind a week before Lunar New Year. And, Dr. W’s one of them.

I sputtered in disbelief when I was told about the misfortune that befell the young aspiring doctor who’d just freed himself from 5 years of torment in med school. It must have been utterly devastating for his family members and those who knew him.

We were not friends. There was not much interaction between us. But, my heart ached.

May you rest in peace, Dr W.