Removing 10 kg, 2 Feet Tall Tumour from Dying Farmer’s Body, Dr Ushast Dhir is a Hero India Needs

What is your take on doctors and in particular, the field of medicine? They have said for the longest time that maybe medicine is no longer a great field today. They have also shared that the field is no longer attracting people of great promise and sincerity because the spectre has become all about money. It’s this great space of the yesteryears that is only attracting people who are interested in commercial trappings of a great lucrative career, worrying less about the empathy and pain of patients.

But perhaps, all these renderings prove to be a tad bit overstated and even misplaced when you consider that there are those of the likes of Dr Ushast Dhir.

One of the most respected practitioners of medicine in the national capital territory region, Dr Ushast Dhir is currently making news. And if you happen to have followed it, you’d understand just why does the country need expert doctors. The job of a medical expert is to care for lives, to tend lives with care and caution. Their task isn’t to appear devilish and goonish figures who others only see as money-extracting machines and not as pure humans.

Saving the life of a jaded man from Rajasthan who was all but dead, Dr Ushast Dhir was involved in a successful but complex 10-hour surgery wherein he successfully removed a large tumour from the abdomen of a farmer whose chances of survival, it is believed, weren’t all that great.

Incredibly, what eventually became a saga of the Dr Ushast Dhir versus a tumour, the latter, standing 10 kilograms in weight and around 2 feet in height- can you believe that- saw the triumph of skill and expertise in surgery. These are precisely those moments when years and years of practice, guile and experience count. If this alone isn’t a reason to believe that the country desperately needs several more doctors of the talent and dexterity of Dr Ushast Dhir, in the revered Ganga Ram Hospital, then one wonders what might ever suffice?

In his current capacity, Dr Ushast Dhir who serves as Consultant, Department of Surgical Gastroenterology and Liver transplantation at the Sir Ganga Ram, has made not only the city proud but rather, an entire nation proud. In saving the life of a poor farmer from Rajasthan, who might have been the only bread-earner for his family, the field of medicine has proven that lives matter and therefore, must be saved at all costs.

But in what seems to be an act of immense selflessness, the doctor has hailed the surgery, citing reasons for the success to the combined efforts of a ‘multi-disciplinary team’ including- urologist, neurologist and, cardiologist. No win, anyways, seems profound or satisfying unless and until it hails the combined brilliance of a team that perhaps often gets unrewarded in the wake of a success.

But while there are difficult surgeries and the more complex ones, this one, however, was something else. In the words of the valiant doctor, “This tumour had grown so huge that it had displaced his intestines to the left side of his body. The tumour was compressing on all structures of his abdomen including his liver, both his kidneys, stomach and spleen,” he added.

Why the surgery was required in the farmer’s case was because of the need to pump blood into his heart. And fewer are the occasions wherein complex situations reach onerous procedures that go over 10 hours at a stretch, in a bid to normalise things from the life and death situations. Perhaps, this mighty achievement may have further bolstered a lot of confidence in the minds and hearts of those who are often critiquing the current scenario of doctors and the medical field in general.

One wonders, whether more and more people around the country would be getting around to read the amazing story of Dr Ushast Dhir? Wonder whether more people would be encouraged to take the discipline and change the perception that people so often have about today’s doctors. Perhaps, change needs to begin here and now with inspiring feats such as these.