The Forgotten Lecture

Most often you hear praises and acknowledgements from your colleagues, bosses, the customers or patients for something you did. I think, unless you are a magnet (sucker) for applause, which is going to vanish in the air as a deep breath you took seconds before.

I know that sometimes we forget thanking people for something we received; sometimes it is pardoned, if it was your parent who helped you.

One day, possibly years after I had a sit-down conversation with my grown up son, something he asked struck me, with surprise as well as elation.

That was about a forgotten lecture I did at the Royal Society of Medicine, London in 1992.

Just to put this into the perspective, RSM is the old society whose notable members included Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Edward Jenner and Sigmund Freud, to name a few.

I was surprised when my son who visited London last year came up with the question, “Dad, I heard that you lectured at the Royal society”

I tried to hide my emotions and without eye contact, I said, “What are you talking about?”

I kept eating my food.

Then silence, except for the clashes of cutlery.

My thoughts went back two decades, to a time before he was born.

I was sitting at that lonely clinic, perched on top of the two story building at the market street in Al Ain, UAE, where no one came to see me, climbing the hot narrow concrete steps.

 I just sat there reading the textbooks one after another.

When I got bored, I would venture into the summer heat waiting for me outside. There was an old calendar on the wall, left by some drug company representative, showing the interactions of various drugs. It fell off the wall bringing dried plaster with it.

I was just looking through a copy of BMJ on the table. I looked at the classifieds, and the meeting announcements. There it was…

Royal Society of Medicine, Computers in Medicine forum, meeting.

Now soliciting papers. Only one week left for the deadline.

I thought about it for a while.

My life is wasted here, on this mirage of the desert, trying to make a living, far away from family.

 Why should I do it? I was spending more than what I made. I lived under the kindness of good friends. But how long I could survive there?

At the lunch break, while running through the empty walkways back to the safe cool room in the flat, I was thinking of the paper I could submit.

Then I wrote: “Drug Interaction Alert and Therapeutic Decision support”.  I asked a friendly colleague to type it out on his office computer and put in a floppy disc. Next day I sent it by mail.

I had no idea how to go further at that time. May be I should write a program using Dbase and C which I learned two years earlier. I had no solid plan.

Next week I wrote to the Gulf News about the people blasting Murphy Brown and also about American Vice President’s English. Then I wrote to Diana Spencer.  I did not know the correct address.

Days on that desert town were monotonous for next two weeks.

On that day I had two letters waiting at my work place.

I opened the one from St James Palace, London.

 It said: the Prince and Princess were deeply touched by my kind words.

Officially signed, Diana.

Ok.

Next one… from the Royal Society of Medicine, accepting my paper for the presentation.

When my mind came back to the dinner table, I asked, “Yeah… who told you about it? That was one time I got bored and did something really silly.”

“But that was great”, my son.

“I didn’t even bother to renew my membership. It was long time back”.

I ignored the glistening eyes of my son staring at me.

Instead I said, “What you guys want to do tomorrow?”

Thank you son, you made your dad proud.