By Neena Bhandari
A prolonged brush with the healthcare system during his high school years steered Vivekananda Jha towards medicine. Multiple visits to the doctors, uncertain diagnosis, rudimentary care and the prolonged physical, mental and financial stress of ailment, made him determined to pursue medicine as a career.
He grew up in Bihar, and graduated from the Patna Medical College, before moving to the prestigious Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) in Chandigarh to do his post-graduation in Internal Medicine and Nephrology.
“Nephrology offered the possibility of extending a patient’s life even after they had developed advanced end-stage organ failure by providing them with dialysis or kidney transplantation, whereas with other organs that was not the case in the late 1980’s”, says Dr Jha, who hails from a family of teachers, and so he is the only doctor “on-call” in their entire extended family.