R2I of a Surgeon - Back to where it all started

[acothread]

Hi everyone,
I thought I will pen my thoughts down since I returned to India recently and also at the moment I have a lot of time on my hands. Hope it does not continue:emcrook:. To tell something about myself - I am a minimally invasive, bariatric and cancer surgeon who has recently returned from the United Kingdom after spending fifteen years there. I have come back to Chennai -boy has it changed? I now know parts of the city which I never knew existed.

I left after completing my Masters in General Surgery from one of the government hospitals in Chennai. My Dad was fed up of me begging for money from him and once asked me - " When do you plan to start earning?" I was 27 then and was earning a paltry 1500rupees/month as stipend. This was 1999. I remember many times when my two wheeler Kawasaki used to run out of petrol and I had to push my bike to the nearest petrol bunk. The local petrol station guy knew I was a doctor and used to ask - "Enna sir? Masa Kadasiya - Is it the end of the month?" It was a sobering experience when that happened.

I was spurred into action partly by my fathers words and partly by the fact that if I went on like this no sensible girl would marry me and made my way to the UK and started earning decent money. Marriage to my lovely wife followed and then two kids. So life was progressing at a frenetic pace. I was busy trying to climb up the ladder and I managed to complete my surgical training in the UK and became a Consultant. I missed investing in the real estate boom in Chennai and had several sleepless nights because of that as I always wanted to come back to India. I did invest a little bit though not to the extent where it would have left me financially independent. I have sworn to myself that I will not let my children commit the financial mistakes that I made. I am very impressed with some of the people on this forum who have made lots of money in real estate and invested at the right time - Kudos to them.

I had a good time in the UK and I am very grateful for the opportunities that it gave me in terms of the training that I was given and the money that I was able to earn. It did take me a long while to reach the top but I did eventually make it. There is some bias in the system towards local doctors but having come to India when I see the bias here I think overall the UK system is fair. I have left some good friends and colleagues back in the UK. There were people who were ready to offer me a job at their hospital but I left everything and decided to come back to Chennai.

My yearning to come back started in October 2012 - this was when I was ready to complete my surgical registrar training (residency for you Americans). Me and my wife used to discuss about coming back every day in the morning. This got to such an extent that my children told me that either you do it Dad or stop talking about it. So in the end I decided to do it.

I got a job offer in Coimbatore and I was preparing to come back but for various reasons it fell through. I was very disappointed but kept on looking. I managed to get a job for my wife (She is a paediatrician). A national chain of Indian hospitals was opening another branch in Chennai and they were looking for a paediatrician. My wife (Bless her heart) decided to leave along with kids (son 10, daughter8). My kids did not know a single word of Tamil then. The months before their return to the UK I used to teach my children Tamil when I was driving the car. They would forget the words that I would have taught them the very next day - it used to be so frustrating :angry:

D-day came and my kids and wife left on the 2nd of January 2013. I went back to our house and could not stop crying for a while.:cry: We had bought the house in 2003 when our son was 1 and my daughter was born and had lived all her life there. Somehow I managed to pull myself up and started the process of packing all our things to be transported back to India. I could do that only at weekends as I had moved to a different job which was not in the city where my house was. I used to come back home to an empty house and would sit there with a glass of wine and think about the fun times we had in the house. I went through an emotional rollercoaster at that time.

The house was on the market. It was not a good time to sell. The house also being in the North of the UK had not risen an iota in value and I managed to eventually sell it for the same price that I bought it in 2003. I lament to myself from time to time that if I had invested that money in India I would be a multimillionaire by now. But Hey what is meant to be will be:wink. I sold the house and stayed for another year in the UK and then finalised a job offer in Chennai and moved back in August 2014.

I landed in chennai on a hot dusty morning. The flight landed at 3:30AM and my dear wife came to pick me up on her own. My wife was staying with my inlaws and my kids were going to school nearby. My parents had not been very keen on the idea of me coming back. They thought I was being emotional and a bit stupid leaving a developed country to come back to India. My elder sister is a physician in California and is well settled there. But I had a tendency to rebel - so when my Dad said don`t come, I decided it was time to go. :))

Anyway I digress. I started work five days later. For the first ten days I must have seen about five patients in total. I did not do my first operation until about two weeks after joining. So it has been tough. I still have days where I am not referred any patients and I sit here wondering whether it was the right decision to come back. I am still not the preferred surgeon for a lot of people in the hospital and the list of slight insults goes on. But I am not leaving without a fight or not leaving in the near future at least.

Things are better on the family front. My wife has got a decent practice now though she is not even into six figures a month. My kids love India and wonder why I did not bring them back earlier. My daughter speaks Tamil like a local girl. My son speaks in Tamil like the British in the old Indian movies. I have told him that a career in Bollywood or Kollywood awaits:wink. We have bought a flat in the suburbs of Chennai which hopefully once built will make us as happy as the house in the UK.

More to continue .......

[sumachechi]

Lovely write-up, very nostalgic. Stay patient and continue to do quality work-its only a matter of time, practice will pick up. Network, network, network. Give talks in neighbouring towns and cities and ask your hospital if they will get u a spot on TV. Best wishes

[r2blore2009]

Very nice write-up. Wishing you all the very best. Good Luck. You are in a noble profession and things will eventually work out for you.