Dr. Paul Heals and Inspires
My Story
By Dr. Mini Paul
Dr. Paul is an Eye Surgeon and Clinical Director of the Christian Medical Center and Hospital in Machilipatnam, India.
It was 8:00 pm, and I finally completed the scrub list for the next day’s OR, a task every first-year resident is responsible for. I went to the ward to review the cases assigned to me for preoperative preparation and discovered that little eight-year-old Bindu was one of them. She was reluctant to be examined, shielding her face with her hands as she had just finished dinner and was preparing for bed.
After spending two months in the pediatric ward, I became adept at interacting with children. I stood beside her and inquired about her day and her experience in the hospital so far. Her mother mentioned that she kept asking to be taken outside to play and buy candies. I suddenly remembered that I had a few Éclair chocolate toffees in my backpack, which I gave to her. Her face brightened with a broad smile as she gently held my hands. I could not help but notice how soft, cold, and tiny her hands were, and I found it difficult to let go.
I slightly tickled her hand, and she instantly started to giggle, which seemed to convey a soundless message of comfort and trust. Instead of asking her mother to bring her to the examination room as usual, I waited until her mother got free and was beside me. Holding Bindu’s hand, we walked together to the examination room, playfully tickling each other’s hands.
Bindu was diagnosed with a rare connective tissue disorder known as Weill-Marchesani Syndrome (WMS). The disease leads to mental retardation, congenital glaucoma, and short stature. She had undergone multiple treatments at various hospitals. All of them suggested that her condition might require several surgeries, which would potentially affect the family’s financial status and impact the lives of her two siblings going to school. She was treated like a celebrity in the ward, and most of her surgical bills were written off by the department.
These were the exact words of her mother, “If not for this ‘promised land,’ we would have left our child to her fate.”
This is not just the story of Bindu and her family. This is the story of most patients who step into the Christian Medical College, Vellore. Working with such people coming from disadvantageous situations challenged me to become more understanding and compassionate, and I have learnt it from observing the same quality in all my teaching physicians and nurses.
I still remember my beloved teacher saying, “we do not treat the disease of the patient but the patient who has the disease because medicine is not just about science, it is also about people. Every day, every OR, and every department meeting starts with prayer and it’s probably the only place where a surgeon says to their happy patients that ‘it was all God and not I who did it.’”
I was one of those kids who always wanted to be a doctor growing up, unlike Dr. Ida Scudder (lovingly called Aunt Ida at CMC) who never wanted to become one until that one day when she was moved so much by seeing the death of three women in labor. However, I was certain that I wanted to study at the same medical college that she started.
I could not get into the Undergraduate Programme, but I felt truly fortunate to be able to complete two Postgraduate Programmes here. My recent postgraduate degree in ophthalmology has made me fall in love with the medical and surgical amalgamation of it. Now that I have finished my training and have returned to my own promised land, I want to be that physician like Aunt Ida for all the people who step into my territory, the Christian Medical Center (Mission Hospital of NACEA in Machilipatnam), my small version of Christian Medical College.
