Consider the population of West Virginia, which currently comes in at roughly 1.7 million, including an unincorporated town or two.
Consider everyone you know in that breakdown.
Using your mind’s eye, take all those people – including your wife, your husband, your kids, your grandkids, your neighbors, your in-laws, your co-workers and that new family you haven’t met yet that just moved in at the end of your street – and multiply by two.
Or four.
Or six.
Or 600.
Again, using your imagination, put that assemblage into the respective waiting rooms of two hospitals in India: two facilities founded by two sons of Rajahmundry, in that country’s southwestern Andhra Pradesh region.
What’s that number come to?
It’s OK – we’ll wait.
Disclaimer: You won’t get a “right” answer.
In fact, it’s going to be quite incorrect.
Totally, unequivocally so.
That’s because you won’t be able to do the medical math.
You won’t simply won’t be able come up with an exact count of patients seen, and successfully treated, in those respective facilities over the years.
There are too many to count.
The real answer comes in the form of a moral, or a philosophy.
We’ll get to that.
Shared souls
Meanwhile, those two doctors with borders in Rajahmundry, and lots of other places, dropped by The Dominion Post this past Thursday to say hello.
One, you likely know, or at least know of: Dr. V.K. Raju is a pioneering Morgantown ophthalmologist, whose city-based Eye Foundation of America performs vision-saving procedures across Appalachia, India and other stops on the globe, often free of charge.
His friend is with whom you’re just making an acquaintance, courtesy of this publication.
Dr. Ganni Bhaskara Rao is a surgeon who founded the sprawling GLS Hospital and medical campus along National Highway 16 near the place where he grew up – making it a beacon for the often economically disadvantaged needing care across Rajahmundry and surrounding region of the city known for its culture and history.
Rao’s hospital is just a 30-minute drive from the one Raju established there earlier.
Morgantown was a social call.
A buddy from back home had flown over to catch up.
Raju does the same with his airline boarding passes to his home country, visiting his friend when he can.
Like-minded motivations
The pair met 30 years ago in India.
That was when Raju operated on Rao’s father, a diabetic experiencing eye issues.
It didn’t take long for a friendship to foster. They’re both from the same place, with shared philosophies.
Kindred spirits.
The medical altruism of Raju by the time he saw Rao’s father in that examination room was well-established.
After medical school in India and residencies in England, where he staffed emergency rooms and practiced internal medicine along with his work in ophthalmology, Raju was recruited to WVU in 1976.
That was for his expertise in corneal transplants.
The eye-saving procedure wasn’t being done here then, or anywhere else in the Mountain State.
Over the years he had other offers to relocate.
The University of Chicago came courting. Another ophthalmologist friend begged him to join his private practice in California.
Too late: He was a Native Son.
“My home among the hills,” he said, grinning.
Beyond the office visit
Like Rao, Raju grew up with a parent afflicted with diabetes.
His widowed mother suffered from kidney disease because of it.
Like Raju, Rao knew that people at home needed medical care – be it major operations or simple maintenance medications.
He couldn’t affix a count to it, either. He just knew they needed care they couldn’t always afford.
His hospital does everything from cardiac procedures to cleft-palate surgeries and all medical points in-between, and often at cost.
Children. The elderly.
It’s his medical college, though, that he most wanted to discuss in Morgantown.
That facility boasts start-of-the-art simulators and other technologies, where budding physicians can practice virtually, in addition to their interactions the genuine flesh and blood article.
“It is the same philosophy as airline pilots training on flight simulators,” Rao said.
“You train, and you train, and you train,” the soft-spoken physician said.
“And then, that training takes over.”
After that, those GSL-trained physicians then do what he did: They go forth, across India, to help people heal.
They go forth, he said, to add years and quality of life, so once-afflicted children can grow to adulthood – and so grandfathers can see the sons of their sons graduate.
“I wanted you to meet this gentleman,” Raju said that day in the newsroom.
Here’s why, said Raju, who often peppers his conversations with Western-style motivational adages and colloquialisms.
“I wanted you to know that if there is a will, there is always a way to get it done. You just have to work.”
‘Because we are obligated to’
Which is where the real answer to all that above-mentioned medical math comes in.
Why do both physicians work so hard?
Why, with both at ages where retirement might be tempting, are they still in operating rooms, reassuring their patients – and then at their desks, reconciling cost ledgers?
Rao answered for his friend.
The small smile that punctuated his answer carried a big volume.
“Because we are obligated to,” he said.
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