After multiple surgeries and months of recovery, Dr Kathryn Fox – Starts at 60’s resident doctor – reflects on what she learned when she found herself on the other side of the hospital curtain, discovering that medical knowledge doesn’t shield you from uncertainty, vulnerability or the slow reality of healing.

It’s an unwritten law: doctors make terrible patients. I’d always assumed that meant we self-diagnose, minimise symptoms and refuse advice.

Then I became the patient.

Not once, but repeatedly – from an emergency Caesarean to arthroscopies, two half-knee replacements at the same time, foot surgery and three months in a wheelchair, more arthroscopies and finally a full knee replacement. I discovered something confronting: knowledge doesn’t protect you from uncertainty, and it certainly doesn’t make you heal faster.

As a doctor, I had explained risks hundreds of times – infection, bleeding, clots, nerve injury, anaesthetic complications. It’s a long list, delivered calmly and meant to reassure. But when you’re the patient, those risks become personal. I could accept a one-in-a-thousand complication. But having treated the one-in-a-thousand, the statistic feels very different.

Trust and consent are also different when emotion, not logic, is in charge.

I once heard it said that no one expects their plumber to have excellent communication skills – we just want the pipes fixed. The line was used to defend surgeons with poor bedside manners. But communication matters. One sports physician who treated me would always begin with, “How are you doing? And how’s the body doing?” It meant a lot to be seen as more than a singular body part.

From the bed, not the bedside

Hospitals run on rhythm: observations, medication rounds, theatre lists, ward rounds. As a doctor, the wards feel rushed. As a patient, time stretches.

You wait for pain relief.

You wait for scans.

You wait to be told whether what you’re feeling is normal.

You wait for dressings to be changed.

The ward round – efficient from the outside – becomes something you prepare for. You write your questions down. Then the team arrives, the conversation moves quickly, and after they leave you realise you forgot the one thing that mattered.

You suddenly understand why patients press the call bell just after you’ve walked away.

Pain is not theoretical

Medical teams ask patients to rate pain from zero to ten. On paper, it seems simple.

After surgery, pain isn’t static and it isn’t just a number. There’s movement pain, resting pain, night pain, physiotherapy pain, swelling, stiffness – and the emotional discomfort of dependence when your body refuses to cooperate. Does pain wake you at night?  Or is it only when you move and wake? It isn’t always clear as a patient. All I know is that I’m not sleeping because of pain and that’s distressing.

I had advised patients to “keep mobile.” I now understood the negotiation behind every step.

There’s also a powerful urge not to bother anyone. You don’t want to seem difficult – particularly as a doctor.

After my first emergency Caesarean, I bled through the sheets in the middle of the night. Instead of pressing the call bell, I decided to quietly fix it myself. This seemed reasonable despite an epidural, IV pole, catheter and several tubes with strong opinions about where I should be.

I slid out of bed, found clean sheets and attempted to remake it while juggling what felt like half the ward’s equipment. Then I couldn’t lower the bedrail. The more I tried, the weaker and dizzier I became.

Thankfully, a nurse found me before gravity did. After helping me back into bed she delivered a memorable message: staff would always rather be called about the sheets – and the bleeding – than find you unconscious on the floor. There are no prizes in hospital for being a martyr.

That was the moment I understood how quickly independence can evaporate – and how accepting help can be the wiser choice.

The expertise reversal

There comes a point in recovery when medical knowledge matters less than the physiotherapist’s instructions – how to sit, stand and trust a body part that feels foreign.

Doctors deal in diagnosis and outcome. Patients live in the middle: the slow weeks where progress is measured in centimetres and setbacks feel enormous.

Healing is slower than medicine suggests.

What I tell people now

After time on both sides of the curtain, I offer friends a few pieces of advice before surgery.

Recovery isn’t linear. Some days move forward; others feel like you’ve gone backwards. That doesn’t mean something is wrong.

Do the rehabilitation – but don’t overdo it. I once tackled stairs too early, produced spectacular swelling and earned myself two days of enforced rest. Healing is biology, not determination.

Be kind to yourself. Surgery is hard work, and bodies follow their own timetable, not the one written on a discharge summary.

And what do I tell doctors?

We learn medicine from textbooks and pattern recognition. We learn empathy from experience – sometimes our own.

Knowledge helps. But being a patient teaches something medicine rarely does: healing happens on the timetable of the person living it, not the person treating it.

The best thing a doctor can do is listen – not just to symptoms, but to how recovery feels. When that happens, rehabilitation becomes a partnership, and outcomes improve for everyone.