'Dr Sahib – I will be completing 19 years of my surgery ‘ – he said with great pride and satisfaction. ‘I want to celebrate and do a press conference !!’ These cheerful words came to me on the phone. It was Mr . Labh Singh, a farmer from Sirsa. He had come to me when I had the ‘long’ experience of 10 years of practice under my belt.
I had left a big corporate hospital of that time – after working abroad - and started the very first heart surgery programme in the private sector in Punjab. The reason for coming to Punjab was that I was operating on at least 3-4 Punjab patients per week – so I thought why not to start in Punjab itself. I had been trying various self-invented indigenous methods for off pump (beating heart) bypass surgery as I was convinced of its advantages. But so far (1990’s) it had been done for single and double vessel bypass only. Mr Labh Singh suffered a heart…
