Adieu, Interventional Cardiology: My Spiritual Journey to a New Ikigai

Jaya Mallidi, MD, MHS

The plain white walls in my new windowless office looked sterile. After months of procrastination, I decided to decorate them with the cards I had received over the years from patients from my interventional cardiology practice. These thank-you cards had been stored in a large box in my car trunk for months. I carried the box to my office and slowly started reading one card at a time, reminiscing about that patient before pinning it to the wall.

"Thank you for saving my life — with all my heart," wrote Mr Kelly, a jovial gentleman in his 60s who had a ventricular-fibrillation arrest when hiking. I remember his son holding his hand in the ICU, patiently waiting for neurologic recovery. The next card was from Shirley. Her husband, Mike, was 40 years old when he came in to the ER with anterior ST-elevation myocardial infarction, cardiogenic shockand had a v-fib arrest on the cath table. "We can never thank you enough for saving my husband. I write this as Mike is sleeping peacefully, with tears of gratitude for giving him the opportunity for a second life, as he calls it," she wrote. "I never met a more kind, compassionate physician.