HALLUCINATIONS

There was a monkey perched on the IV drip stand to the right of my hospital bed. It scowled at me, but I wasn’t afraid: A brief simian visit was part of my daily routine. I never questioned why there was a monkey in the hospital. I wasn’t lucid enough to recognize that my mind was playing tricks on me.

- Rishi Dhir

On 24 October 2020, I visited the emergency room at the London hospital where I worked as an orthopaedic surgeon. An hour earlier, I had developed such severe abdominal pain that I dropped to the floor in agony while teaching a medical education class over Zoom. I couldn’t catch my breath because of the searing pain in my midsection. It felt like a knife stabbing me. I had intense waves of nausea, and then I started vomiting over and over. After the first several heaves, the only thing coming up was green bile. I vomited all the way to the hospital.

ER doctors diagnosed me with necrotizing pancreatitis, an inflammation of the pancreas that causes tissue death. A gallstone had blocked my pancreatic duct, causing my pancreas to become so inflamed that part of it was dying.

I wasn’t surprised that gallstones were responsible, because eight years earlier I’d had a gallstone attack that had caused excruciating abdominal pain. At the time, I’d been a busy medical resident, and I’d decided to focus on my career instead of taking time off to have my gallbladder removed, which doctors had recommended.