✒︎
11
Reflections
What Remains After the Noise
Some chapters of life arrive neatly stitched—one event leading to the next, like a ward round that moves bed to bed with predictable logic. This chapter doesn’t. It is made of pauses, aftershocks, and quiet reckonings. It gathers the moments that did not belong anywhere else: not in the story of work, not in the story of family, not even in the story of achievements. These are the scenes that stayed behind after the day’s rush ended—when the hospital lights dimmed, the house fell silent, and the mind finally asked the questions it had postponed.
There are two heart attacks in these pages, but they are not written as medical episodes. They are written as interruptions—stern, unsentimental reminders that the body has its own timetable. A doctor is trained to look at numbers, interpret tracings, and act fast. A patient, however, listens to something else: the strange quiet inside the chest, the sudden dependence on others, the helplessness of being wheeled instead of walking. In those hours, I learnt again what I had known all along—how thin the line is between control and surrender.
Then come the gentler reflections: a fiftieth birthday that turned into an unexpected audit of relationships; a home that took years to build and became far more than brick and cement; and the slow change in medicine itself—how teaching, training, and trust have altered in ways that leave even old hands slightly disoriented. None of this is written in anger. Time changes institutions the way it changes faces: gradually, then suddenly, and finally beyond recognition.
The last pages move toward the one subject we avoid most faithfully—how we want to leave. Not with drama, not with heroic last stands, but with dignity, clarity, and peace. After forty years of watching families suffer the confusion of “What should we do now?”, I felt the need to answer that question for my own. If these reflections have a single thread, it is this: life is precious, but it is also finite—and the real wisdom lies in knowing what to hold on to, and what to let go.