From rural Nepal, doctor rises to Shanghai’s top
Print Edition
Since his childhood days in rural Nepal, Birendra Kumar Sah dreamed of becoming a doctor. At the time, it seemed to be a pie in the sky. “Learning about medicine was an almost unreachable dream for me,” he says.
There was only one public and one private medical school in his home country. The private school, Sah said, was out of reach due to the high tuition fees, and for the public school, the admission process was incredibly competitive.
He’d have never thought that his dream would come true thousands of kilometers away from his home, in the bustling metropolis of foreign Shanghai. But when a family friend suggested that he should move here to pursue his dream, Sah was up for the challenge.
Today, he’s among the most popular doctors at Ruijin Hospital. As a native of Nepal, he stands out among the Chinese doctors. Patients, he says, don’t try to hide their surprise when they see his foreign face at the public hospital, but the surprise only grows when they start speaking to him. He responds in fluent Mandarin, and when patients are elderly, he seamlessly switches to a perfect Shanghainese dialect.
Almost all of the between 60 and 80 outpatients he sees each day ask how the man with the foreign face and strong build is able to speak their language so fluently.
“I feel Chinese,” he laughs. “I live and work like a Chinese, and I’m married to a Shanghai woman.” It’s the standard answer, and although patients are impressed by his language skills, he’s also earned an exceptional reputation for his professionalism.
At age 38, Sah is now a third level surgeon at one of the country’s top hospitals. He’s allowed to decide whether patients go into surgery, guides junior doctors and teaches students. The path to such success would be arduous for anybody, and the fact that Sah came from Nepal didn’t make it any easier.
Before applying for medical school, Sah enrolled in a Chinese learning program at a university in Henan Province in central China, where he spent day and night studying Chinese.
“After school, I stayed in my dormitory to read, write, recite and talk to myself,” he says, adding that he knew that a good comprehension of Chinese was his first step to becoming a doctor.
After he passed his Chinese ability test, he enrolled at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1998. “I became a medical student in an ordinary class, where all the other students were Chinese.”
He graduated as one of the best of his class. His grades secured him a position at the general surgery department of Ruijin in 2009, making him the first registered full-time foreign doctor in a public hospital in Shanghai.
Friends and colleagues have suggested that he could work in a private clinic, or at a joint venture instead. The income would be much higher, but money isn’t why Sah entered the profession.
“Income is not an issue that concerns me,” he says. “I just want to be a doctor who receives patients and performs surgeries, and at a public hospital I can really improve my skills.”
The plethora of complaints about public hospitals and their staff seems to evade Sah, whose patients all agree that he’s one of the best doctors they’ve ever seen.
“He always smiles while talking with me and carefully asks me about my condition every day,” says Pu Shiquan, an 81-year-old patient, adding that talking to Sah made him feel comfortable and safe.
The secret to his popularity is simple.
“I like to talk with my patients,” he says. By truly listening to their needs and concerns, Sah gains their trust and makes them feel respected. He takes their ailments seriously, and doesn’t mind spending a few more minutes with them, even if it means that he gets home a little later than his colleagues.
“Many people complain about doctors, and there are a lot of medical disputes and misunderstandings between doctors and patients in China. I think the biggest problem is the poor communication between the two parties. If doctors can spend more time talking with the patients, most people will understand them and cooperate,” he says.
After almost two decades in China, Sah says that he now has two homes. One is Shanghai, and the other one is the place where he was born and raised, Nepal.
When he married a Shanghainese woman, also a doctor at Ruijin, in 2014, weddings were held in Shanghai and in Nepal, a sign of the young family’s multicultural background.
And when his first home was hit by a devastating earthquake in April 25 last year, Sah didn’t hesitate a second and joined a Red Cross Society of China medical team that was deployed to the Nepali capital, Kathmandu.
“I just knew that I had to go back to help my people in Nepal, no matter how dangerous it was,” he says.
They arrived five days after the first earthquake, and decided to try to reach the rural, mountainous epicenter, where the most serious damage and largest amount of injuries and deaths occurred.
No medical team had been deployed there yet, and the road, Sah said, was completely destroyed. The last 30 kilometers took the team three hours by car.
The area’s sole health clinic employed only one doctor, who was working relentlessly to help the injured.
Operating out of a tent, the team received more than 100 patients on the first day.
Sah helped the Chinese Red Cross set up a field hospital. Fluent in Nepali and Chinese, he helped with translations, and says that he ended up helping rather as a coordinator than a doctor.
“But I am so happy that I made a meaningful contribution,” he says.
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