16/10/2025
🩺 The Privilege of a Pulse
The other day, during a ward round, I stood beside a patient and felt her pulse — steady, then suddenly irregular.
In that quiet moment, the diagnosis revealed itself: a new onset of fast atrial fibrillation.
The next day, it was gone again — a fleeting rhythm disturbance that could easily have been missed.
Moments like these remind me how precious time at a patient’s bedside truly is — how grace allows us to see what is hidden.
After all the years of training — six as an undergraduate, four as a postgraduate, and two years of internship and community service — I’ve come to realise that medicine teaches one thing above all: to recognise what is normal.
And once your eye knows normal, it immediately senses when something is not.
It’s in that subtle difference — a pulse that skips, a breath that changes, a colour that fades — that the physician’s detective instinct awakens.
From that moment begins the journey of discovery, understanding, and prevention.
Sometimes, simply feeling an irregular pulse during a consultation can change a patient’s future — allowing early prevention of stroke and preservation of quality of life.
Every consultation is a sacred encounter.
To observe, to listen, to feel — and to act before illness takes hold — that is the true heart of medicine.
My deepest drive has always been simple:
✨ To give patients quality of life.
✨ To help them live well — until the very day they die.
As our oncology colleague, Dr Green, often reminds us:
> “Don’t die before you die. Live — until you die.”
That’s our calling. That’s our privilege.
📍From the desk of Drs Bester & Bosch Specialist Physicians
