Pete’s Journey So Far

Pete’s journey began in the early 70s, growing up in the suburbs of Northwest London. In the early years of primary school he wasn’t considered to be that bright, but he didn’t care as he had good friends, comics to read and a red Raleigh Grifter bike to explore his neighbourhood on. With a late rally at age 10, like Manchester United in the 1999 Champions League Final, Pete managed to pass the entrance exam for an all-boys school in Central London.

Pete’s life then became far from “most excellent”. He swapped the care free, friendly environment of his suburban primary school for the malignly competitive atmosphere of his inner city high school. He had enjoyed writing at primary school but at high school, a combination of a lack of inspiring course texts to read for a teenager (Sons and Lovers, Silas Marner etc.) and a negative opinion of the quality of his writing by his high school English teacher, resulted in Pete rejecting the pursuit of any creative writing and culminated in the award of grade “C” for his English Literature O Level exam.

At school Pete found the sciences a much more preferable option, where there was no subjectivity in the marking scheme, and in his sixth year he convinced an interview panel to offer him a place at a London medical school. After a very “Doctor in the House” style medical education, in the mid 90s, with his newly acquired medical qualification hot in his hands he embarked on a career in medicine. However, Pete gradually realised that his path through life had taken a truly bogus turn. As Pete’s journey progressed from his position as a lowly, downtrodden Houseman at a District General Hospital to eventually culminating as a lofty, downtrodden Eye Surgeon at a Teaching Hospital, he gained much insight into how to survive life as a doctor but he had no outlet to share his wisdom. But this was all about to change….

At the end of the calamitous year for the planet of 2020, Pete succumbed to the dreaded Covid-19 plague and to this day still blames his wife Smaranda for being the “Typhoid Mary” of his demise, given her symptoms developed 12 hours before his. Although it was a decidedly unpleasant experience with a prolonged, unrelenting fever that did not seem to want to resolve, it actually turned out to be a serendipitous event.

In the week following return to work after recovery from his Covid-19 infection, as Pete was hauling himself up the stairs in the Eye Pavilion with a residual post-viral reduced lung function and a large bundle of patient case notes, he bumped into his mentor and friend Prof Bal Dhillon. As Pete regaled his tale of pandemic woe, Bal suggested that he write an article about his experience of the Covid-19 illness for publication in the journal Eye News for which he is the Editor.

Following a good reception from Pete’s article, Bal suggested that he write a regular column for Eye News documenting his trials and tribulations of a career in medicine and Pete jumped at the chance. So began his regular instalments entitled “Pete’s Bogus Journey” including regular career and life advice under the heading “Pete’s Hidden Curriculum”. Having had any creativity he may have had crushed out of him during his medical career, Pete enjoyed the freedom of uninhibited writing without any constraints on content, unencumbered by any peer review and only minor editorial input.

The enthusiasm for writing about a wide variety of topics and issues in medicine with humour grew into a passion. With further encouragement from friends and family and most importantly his wife Smaranda, Pete wrote and published his first book “Pete’s Bogus Journey”. A vindication for being told at one stage in primary school that he was below average intelligence and also for living for nearly 40 years with the belief instilled in him by his high school English teacher that he could not write.

As Dr Emmett Brown says in Back To The Future (1985) “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything”