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Beyond the clinic
A surgeon is easier to trust when you know something of who they are. This page is about where I come from, and the people who got me here.
A Delhi childhood, in a house full of medicine
I grew up in New Delhi, in a home where medicine was not a career choice so much as the weather. It was simply what the adults did, and what the conversation at dinner kept returning to. Operating lists, difficult cases, patients who did well and patients who did not.
I did not find surgery. It was around me from the beginning, and at some point I stopped resisting it.
Delhi is home. After a decade in the United Kingdom, in Manchester, Stockport, Teesside and Aberdeen, coming back to practise in the city I grew up in was always the plan, not a fallback.
Birla Vidya Niketan, 2006. A school scholarship for board examination results
The year the job changed
This is how we scrubbed for an emergency operation in the spring of 2020. I am somewhere inside it.
Elective surgery had stopped. What was left was the work that could not wait, the hip fractures, the open injuries, the people whose bones did not care that there was a pandemic on.
The part that is hardest to explain is the drilling. Every time we drilled a hole for a screw, we stopped. Five minutes, sometimes seven, standing there, long enough for the bone dust to settle and for the laminar flow to change the air in the theatre. A plate takes eight screws. Sometimes ten. You can do the arithmetic.
An operation that should have taken an hour took four. In a hot suit, behind a mask and a visor, where you cannot hear properly and everything has to be said twice.
And nobody yet knew what the real risk was. That is the part people forget. We were not being careful because we understood the danger. We were being careful because we did not.
I do not miss it.
Spring 2020. Four hours for an hour of work.
The surgeon I grew up watching
My father, Dr Anil Malik, has been operating for more than forty years. He is a general and laparoscopic surgeon in South Delhi, and a gold medallist in his MS, though you would not learn either fact from him.
What I took from him was not technique. It was the unglamorous part: turning up, explaining things properly, and treating the person in front of you the same whoever they are. He still takes calls from patients he operated on twenty years ago.
He continues to practise at Apollo Spectra, Chirag Enclave. If you are looking for a general or laparoscopic surgeon rather than an orthopaedic one, he is a good place to start.
Dr Anil Malik
- MBBS and MS (General Surgery), Meerut University, Gold Medallist
- Over four decades in general and laparoscopic surgery
- Fellow, Indian Association of Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Surgeons
- Fellow, International College of Surgeons
- Laparoscopic and minimally invasive, gallbladder, hernia, bariatric and cancer surgery
Two surgeons, one dinner table. Most of what I know about how to speak to a frightened patient, I learned by watching him do it.
Tanya Singh
Surgical training asks a great deal of the person who is not doing it. Ten years of moving between cities, nights and weekends on call, fellowships that meant packing up and starting again somewhere new. Tanya carried all of that, usually without being asked and almost always without complaint.
She is a trained graphic and UI/UX designer who went on to build something of her own. And she is, above everything else on this page, the best mother our daughter could have been given.
Edinburgh, 2022. She had as much claim on that scroll as I did.
Kosataga
There is a symmetry to it that I like. I learned my craft in Banaras, at BHU. She works with the people who have been perfecting theirs there for generations.
Home
We are back in Delhi, a short drive from where I grew up, and there is a small person in the house who is entirely unimpressed by any of the above.
You will not find our daughter anywhere on this site. No photograph, no name. That decision is ours to make now and hers to revisit when she is old enough to have a view.
The trauma and orthopaedic department at a Tough Mudder in Nottingham
With Tanya
To my parents, and my sister
To Dr Anil Malik, who showed me what the job actually is.
To the late Dr (Mrs) Neerja Malik, my mother, who is in everything I do and does not get to read this.
And to Anisha Malik, my sister, who has kept me honest since long before I had letters after my name.
Back to the clinical side
If you came here for a shoulder, an elbow, a hip or a knee, that is all through here.