Week 1540 - The Tyranny of Being Reachable...Or The Value of Becoming a Ghost

The Concept Explained

Counting Down to 90 - Week 1579

Why 1579

Bhavin's WritingsBhavin Jankharia

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I have copied part of this title from a post by Miski Omar, published in The Guardian on 01 Jul.

Last week, a surgeon messaged me about one of our team members, whose phone was unreachable for a couple of days. I told him he was traveling in the jungles of Central India, photographing wildlife, where likely there was no cellphone service. The surgeon just couldn’t believe this was possible.

Four days ago, a colleague called from a tier II city asking me to come down to take a lecture on a Saturday. I was busy reporting scans, so I told him I will get back later in the day or the next day. The next morning this person went berserk with multiple calls, again while I was in the middle of reading scans and I had to block him temporarily. He also left urgent WhatsApp messages asking me to reply. I finally declined the invite in the evening, but I still haven’t understood why any of this was urgent…no one was dying or bleeding.

In the days before cellphones and pagers, if you wanted to talk to a doctor or colleague, you had to call on the landline or send a letter or land up at the clinic or home. If you didn’t want to be reachable at any time during the day or night, all you had to do was not be at home or the clinic or just put the phone off the hook. If you wanted to be unreachable over an extended period of time, all you had to do was go away and that was that. It was easy to be unreachable and the consequences weren’t major…perhaps, you might lose a patient or two or an invitation or two, but most of the times, people would just wait for your return, unless it was an emergency. Because you weren’t expected to be reachable, those trying to reach you didn’t have undue expectations of how fast you should reply.

Today, not only are you expected to be immediately reachable, a reply is also expected ASAP. With blue ticks, green ticks, double ticks on iMessage or WhatsApp, if you’ve made the mistake of seeing the message and the other person knows you’ve seen it, they take offense if you don’t respond immediately. If you just want to take time off during the day, it’s not easy, but I’ve done one thing that has helped…about 5 years ago, I disabled Read Receipts in WhatsApp, so that people have no clue whether I’ve read a message or not…in turn I also do not know whether they’ve read my message and that’s fine…I couldn’t care less. If it’s important, I will call. 

When I was reading this Guardian piece, I was reminded of an article I wrote in Nov 2023, titled Is My Worth as a Doctor Just a Function of How Fast I Pick Up the Phone?, which basically had the same riff.

Is My Worth as a Doctor Just a Function of How Fast I Answer the Phone?

My worth as a doctor to my colleagues has to be more than just how fast I pick up their phone

Bhavin's WritingsBhavin Jankharia

Being reachable constantly for a young doctor starting out in practice is perhaps a natural phenomenon and a need, but having just crossed 60 and having been a doctor now for almost 37 years, and having lived through times without cellphones, I have my boundaries. I’m happy to help, to take calls and talk and interact…but on my terms and when I want to…but these are always porous because of the profession we are in. For example, while I’m protective about my weekends, yesterday on a Saturday…a colleague wanted an urgent appointment, another colleague wanted an urgent report, a third called for a family member’s scans to be urgently reviewed…and I was happy to help because I was around and because that is the nature of our profession.

But, by the same token, if it’s not an emergency, social or medical, then I will ignore those messages or calls until I am ready to be reachable and available.

Sometimes, a poem captures it best. I took a little help from Gemini especially for the last stanza.

A leash held by a hundred hands buzzes,
a voice, sharp with its own importance
demands a slice of my time
as if it were loose change
to spend without care.

I remember.
To be unreachable
you had to just walk out the door
and the world would wait.
It knew how.

Now, every blue/green/single/double tick
is a judgement.
Every delayed reply,
a minor sin.
The urgency of the non-urgent,
the loudest noise of all.

So I finally draw the curtain
on these casual invasions
and manufactured crises.

I become the ghost.
I own the quiet spaces
between the signals.