Week 1531 - When a Mentor Passes

The Concept Explained

Counting Down to 90 - Week 1579

Why 1579

Bhavin's WritingsBhavin Jankharia

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Over the last few days, many of her colleagues and associates have shared personal stories and anecdotes about Anita and the influence she has had on their lives. I am sure there are many, many more that remain unwritten. Here is one more. 

One case that I still show at conferences is of a middle-aged woman, known to have an incidental labial hemangioma for many years, who presented with a change in the thickness of her thighs. An MRI showed a sacral tumor responsible for this. I biopsied that lesion and the initial report was a carcinoma/sarcoma. A PET/CT showed liver and lung lesions, but the exact primary and nature of the tumor remained indeterminate. 

Anita called me perplexed and asked if there was perhaps a tumor somewhere in the vaginal region. It turns out that the so-called labial hemangioma that had been ignored for so many years, was in fact a slow growing alveolar soft part sarcoma (ASPS) that had metastasized. 

The moment I told her about the labial hemangioma, she had a Eureka moment, did one more marker and the diagnosis of ASPS was confirmed. 

How and when I first met her is shrouded now in the mists of time. She was part of an old medical family, her father, the renowned Dr. Ernest Borges, after whom the street on which Tata Hospital stands is named and Eric, her cardiologist brother, who I have known since 1991, when I joined Bombay Hospital as a registrar. Given the way things are these days, she would be labeled a nepo-baby, as am I, and we would have had a laugh discussing this.

Ever since I started doing biopsies, I knew that the final word was always Dr. Anita Borges’, but it was when I became deeply involved with bone tumors that I started interacting with her more closely. We used to often find ourselves in conferences giving lectures back to back, her lecture if before mine, a tough act to follow…I always hoped my lecture was before hers, so it wouldn’t pale in comparison.

I would call her “Ma’am” and I remember once in the early to mid 2000s, when we were in Bengaluru at the Ramaiah Medical College for a conference, she took me aside at lunch and told me firmly to call her “Anita”. It took me a little while to get used to that, but since Ravi Ramakantan had also told me to call him Ravi, I finally started addressing her by her first name. In turn, I started telling my junior colleagues to call me “Bhavin”, though it is getting harder and harder for juniors to not use “sir”, especially now that even first year residents call their second year seniors, “Sir and Ma’am”. 

I learnt so much from her…to never give up on a case…to keep diving deeper, even if it meant going down rabbit holes…to keep asking questions…and to challenge the referring doctors if things didn’t match up. 

In 2007, when I joined the Piramal group, we became colleagues as heads of separate practice verticals. Once the PET/CT was installed in Lower Parel, my office was two floors below hers and we would interact even more. Each year, she would send me a marzipan cake on her birthday and sometimes a bottle of wine if she was traveling. She had this wonderful sense of self-deprecating humor and it was always a pleasure to spend time conversing with her on any subject in the world, medical or non-medical.

Mentors are hard to find…not all of them come into your lives in a structured manner…it was only when I was thinking of her after the horrible news I received of her sudden death in Gorakhpur on Thursday night that I realized she had been a mentor to me in so many different ways.

I always thought we would be still discussing histopath diagnoses for another decade or so…

Some deaths hurt more than others. And some are tinged with anger, when you know that the person still had so much more to give this world.

She epitomizes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s definition of success, “To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded”. She achieved this success, perhaps even beyond her own wildest dreams and hopes.