I was just about to start my residency more than 20 years ago when I noticed I was losing weight.
Actually, I did not notice it.
My colleague did and commented, but I did not listen. I kept going. I did my clinics.
One client actually tried to tell me. God bless her.
But she was so nice about it, I again did not listen. I kept operating.
Until one day, I felt more woozy than normal after a case and decided to check my weight.
I was horrified to realise that I was 20kg below my usual weight.
This woke me up.
I called my mum and went home.
I got diagnosed and then spent the next year being treated for tuberculosis.
I remember getting into the queue with other TB clients, waiting my turn for meds and wondering if I deserved better.
I felt alone.
I had contracted an infection at work and there was no safety net to fall back on. I walked the lonely road of recovery.
There was no human resources support.
There was no call from my hospital. I returned to work in three months because I felt better.
I kept going. I would finish my training a decade later.
Now it’s history I look back on and I am thankful.
I have since had to take medications for HIV, suffered COVID-19 four times and broken down from exhaustion many times.
I have become a veteran on the road to recovery.
It is always an isolated road.
When my classmate from medical school was recently hospitalised for complications from tuberculosis, I realised nothing had changed over two and a half decades.
In the long run, when he needed expensive intensive care, we had to raise money for him.
He was left alone by the institution he had worked in for 20-something years.
He still went back to working for the same institution when he recovered.
We keep going, but really, we work in an environment which has nothing to fall back on when something goes wrong.
I love the job I do. I am privileged to do what I do in a country as blessed as this one.
I have to accept that there will always be limitations because the country I live in treats the healthcare industry like it treats the Kumasi road.
We have accepted that our two main cities should be connected by a single-carriage road without a railway for a generation.
In 2026, we have accepted as a country that a well-built car from another country should take eight hours to travel 250 km.
We have adapted, improvised, justified, excused this terrible insult to our collective intelligence… and we have lost thousands of lives that should not have been lost.
No one has ever been punished for the carnage that takes place on that single road every day. No contractor, no engineer, no politician… no one.
We just accept it as a country, like other countries accept their weather conditions and move on.
We seem to want to do the same thing with healthcare as a country.
At the moment, it is almost impossible to gain admission to any of our public medical schools without 7As at WASSCE.
Those who finish medical school in this country are among the best minds we have.
How we think we can plunge high-functioning individuals into a failed system and expect optimal returns beats my imagination.
My young colleagues working at the three big hospitals in Accra did wrong.
The facts do not lie. They could have done much, much better.
But I do hope that in the coming days, their hospitals and the council will consider the ecosystem that nurtured their actions, in addition to the players who have done wrong.
After all, the fact that the same thing happened in three major hospitals is not as indicative of malicious staff as it is of a system that has failed.
When three major hospitals repeat the same wrong, it cannot be that their staff uniformly decided to be cruel and uncaring the same night.
It must be because this is the system we have created for ourselves, manifesting the only way a failed system does.
It does not matter how much we punish these medical staff if the system is only going to produce more like them.
The writer is a Neurosurgeon
