Page 35 - NEWSLETTER_30

ΣΥΝΈΝΤΈΥΞΗ
or twice a year, like a ureteric injury during a radical prostatectomy or during a hysterectomy. The spectrum changes with time. If you look up my workload, I don't send any patient to be seen by another doctor and to be operated on. On the other hand, there are a fair number of patients who come to me from all over the world. So, it depends on what you can do.
T.S.: What would be your advice to residents and young urologists who have just started their careers?
Prof. Anthony Mundy: I don't know if I would give any advice, because each individual has their own ideas, their own aspirations, and this, that, and the other. There are some work styles that are incompatible with the sort of lifestyle a lot of people have. For example, I am one of those very few people in the UK, who has a British Airways Executive Gold Card. You have to have done a hell of a lot of flying to get a British Airways Executive Gold Card and I am the only one I know in Urology, who has got one of those. Also, I have been married and divorced twice earlier in my career and maybe the two are related somehow! I'm sure you get a sense of what I'm talking about. Indeed, my secretary during the COVID period, when life changed quite a lot for all of us, was sitting around with nothing much to do one morning and then told me that she worked out that each year I spend five weeks sitting in an airline lounge, for example, the British Airways departure lounge. I don't mean in the airplane but sitting and waiting to take off for five weeks a year, in hours accumulated. As a result of that sort of time spent there, hanging around and doing not very much, my alcohol intake is probably a little high! Therefore, I think whatever you choose to do, there is going to be a relative upside and a relative downside. In the end, either things work themselves out or you work them out. My guess is that actually you just get moved along by events in life.
F.N.: Throughout your career, you have traveled and worked in various locations around the world. How have these experiences influenced your professional development and your career as a urologist?
Prof. Anthony Mundy: I will tell you what happened that really made the difference. When I was about 29 years old, I was newly married to my second wife and I had bought a house. Back then inflation was a big problem in the economy of the country. One evening, I
went to the opening of the new block at Guy's Hospital, which was 35-storeys high. There's a wonderful view from the very top of the whole of the Old City of London. Spectacular! They had an opening party there and a fellow came up to me and said: "Are you Tony Mundy?" and I said: "Yes". He said: "Would you like to go and work in Oman?". At first, I thought he said Amman, in Jordan. I said: "You must be joking". Anyway, I laughed it all off. But the next day, my bank manager phoned me and said: "Do you realize your bank account is 4000 pounds overdrawn?". In those days, about 40 years ago, that was a hell of a lot of money. I mean, the house I bought cost 13,000 pounds. These days you pay 300,000 pounds for a house like that. So, I thought: "Oh, my God!" and all of a sudden, I remembered this guy I had been talking to the night before, who asked me if I would like to go to Oman. I phoned him up and said: "What's the deal?". First, he clarified to me that he was talking about Oman, not Amman. There was a war in Yemen and he needed to provide surgical support for the Omani army. He asked me if I would like to go and join the army. So, I joined the Army and I became a Colonel. I went to a "nonexistent" Omani Medical Group and we started literally from nothing. We didn't have anything. Eventually we got hold of some surgical instruments, but we had no way of sterilising them. We had no suture material, so we had to go to the Souk (Arab market) and buy silk and sewing needles that the women were using. Initially, we used local anesthetic for almost everyone, including people who had major injuries and gunshot wounds and the like. But slowly we built the service up. This way you learn that all of the things that people used to do historically, all had immense good value. For example, in amputations, whether it was an arm or a leg, they would ligate the blood vessels and the nerves, but they would always leave the stitches hanging out of the skin wound and the skin wound was always very loosely approximated, so any infection could ooze out and healing would be satisfactory. In the end, the silk would slough off and drop off. So, we basically learned surgery from the sort of 17th century onwards, up to the present date, over a matter of a few months.
There are other fascinating things. I found a book in an old bookshop in London, and it was printed in 1920 odd. It was written by a doctor who worked in the Middle East and learned that one of the more common problems you had with very young children and babies was they would die from dehydration. What he did was to get a 20-cc or a 50-cc syringe and boil up some saline, literally by taking a litre
Tεύχος 30 | Iούλιος-Αύγουστος 2024
35