Lived Experiences In Cardiothoracic Surgery: A Personal View

Abstract

This chapter narrates the story of patients with cardiac illnesses requiring surgery and reveals how the physician-surgeon tries to reconcile a low resource setting patient care narrative with resource demanding modern scientific medicine and the areas of disconnect that this generate. This chapter is written in three parts. The first part is a narrative of training that the author received and the development of his philosophy of medicine. The second part describes his experiences in the government health services in the State of West Bengal in India and the third describes how we worked in a remote location in Nepal, the author was able to set up a cardiothoracic unit. The chapter narrates the problems, solutions and outcomes of surgery in these circumstances and how it was possible to overcome difficulties to offer a service to the patients which, while having many flaws, did offer treatments that would have never been possible for them to access otherwise.