I have been a physician since 1993. Everything else is context — or an add-on, if you prefer.
I started out in Cluj, an intern at the Third Medical Clinic, convinced — like every intern — that I already knew plenty. The Romanian healthcare system kindly offered to prove me wrong. Rather rudely, in fact. It has been at it for thirty years and still isn't done.
By 1995 I was a plain doctor in Vălenii de Munte — some days at the hospital, some at the dispensary, some at the factory clinics. I went wherever management sent me, and management sent me often. I also saw patients at the dispensary in Făget, near Vălenii de Munte — a building put up, it seems, in the 1940s, in the days of the kings; it has witnessed more healthcare reforms than all of us put together, and outlived every one of them. In the nineties I also did sanitary inspections through the surrounding villages: checking whether the pub kitchens were clean and whether the shopkeeper at the village store touched the bread with her bare hands when she sold it. Rural medicine has a curriculum no faculty teaches. Those were the times — and the irony hides in one amusing detail: years later, in 2006, I helped set up the State Sanitary Inspection, which then fined me. Silly me.
It was also in Vălenii de Munte that I saw a kindness and a humble devotion to the practice of medicine I have rarely met since: a small hospital, kept impeccably, where big-hearted people with scarce resources fought for other people's lives as if they were their own. That was around 1995; I have seldom encountered people so dedicated to doing good. I felt I was living the old Romanian film „Red Apples" in real life.
Then I put on the uniform of a military physician, until around 2004. Nine years and seven months. I sat in ambulances beside the sick, the emergency kit between my knees. I was woken in the middle of the night by phone calls that never bring good news. I left on missions knowing when I was leaving but not when I would return; I slept in tents and ate dry bread and canned food shoulder to shoulder with the boys from the operative units — in '99, at Costești, I patched up colleagues wounded in the clashes with the striking miners. I retired from the service with the rank of lieutenant colonel, but the job that taught me most remained that of mission medic. And it was then that I understood a simple truth: the people who guard our sleep and keep trouble away from us have their own troubles inside their profession — families, worries, and pressure, both arterial and occupational. One more observation: their respect is not won with rank, nor by barking orders. It is won in the tent, over the same tin of food.
The year 2005 found me at the Prahova Public Health Directorate, where my only luck was bad luck: food poisoning outbreaks, floods, avian flu. Public health taught me the rule nobody mentions in medical school: if you do your job perfectly, nothing happens. And nobody notices. And when — whatever you do — something does happen, you are to blame: you failed to prevent what was coming.
Then life and politics carried me, surprisingly, through the upper floors of power: state inspector general, secretary general of the Ministry of Health, president of the National Consumer Protection Authority, a stopover at the Ministry of Environment, a speech at the UN. I had begun to believe I actually deserved honours and respect because I temporarily occupied certain offices. What foolishness. Fortunately, it passed quickly. From below, institutions look imposing; inside, there are intrigues, calculations, people better and worse, telephones and deadlines. I also watched reforms up close: one real one, around 2007–2008, and after it a series of patch-ups — fires were put out, trousers were mended, socks were darned, but the system never got dressed properly, head to toe, elegantly. The genuinely useful things I did were almost always done the same way: with a pen, a telephone, and a clear idea. An organisational chart heals no one. Neither do long meetings, nor parading a painted crow as a parrot.
In 2008 I returned to seeing patients and opened my own clinic in Ploiești. For twelve years I was simultaneously a doctor and an administrator — the combination that cures you of entrepreneurial romanticism for good. I learned that a medical business does not just mean good services offered to people: it means competition, marketing, twelve-hour workdays, taxes, accreditations, contracts, machines that break down on Friday afternoon and, above all, doctors. Managing the relationships between doctors is an Olympic discipline: each one is right in his own way. Usually all of them at the same time.
In 2020 the state called me back — first to the public health directorate, then to the Ministry — precisely as the pandemic was starting. That is the only kind of punctuality our system ever shows: for trouble. And there is always some fool who answers the call. Then, from 2021, for four years, I ran the county hospital in Ploiești. Some say it went well. Others, as always, were mightily displeased. People called me "Mister Manager" and it made me laugh; I would tell them: I am a doctor, my name is Bogdan — whom would you like to talk to, me or the position? But the most useful part of the job was still the one I had learned at the dispensary: I could, officially, ask people what hurts and listen to the answer all the way to the end. That is what I tried to do — to solve, as far as possible, some of their problems. Along the way I picked up two operations of my own and one clogged coronary artery, but my colleagues put in a stent quickly, so I shouldn't complain.
Along the way I have, inevitably, made enemies too. Some of them have inexhaustible energy: they nip at my ankles precisely when life is at its sweetest. May they be healthy, and may God assist them. As a small, green and wise master once put it: hate leads to suffering. I sincerely believe that living in frustration and carrying grudges is the purest waste of time: life is too short an interlude between embryo and epitaph. Peace, man!
Even today an acquaintance will call me: "Doctor, you recommended me a surgeon — how much should I slip him?" Good grief, have you lost your mind? You're asking me? My recommendation is not a till receipt. I have enough troubles on my plate as it is — spare me. But that is how we were raised, envelope at the ready — and unlearning it is family medicine work too, just like vaccination.
Now, after three decades through every room of the system — from the field tent to the meeting halls of the Ministry — I have returned to where I started: to the consulting room, beside my patients. I have carried plenty of titles on my business cards; some sounded rather good. Only one of them never pinched: doctor.
P.S. I have started writing — here and on the blog — not because talent torments me all that much, but because I have almost grown old: I will soon change the first digit of my age, and perhaps some of you will find a few of these writings worthwhile. But be careful with my advice — as a saying goes, attributed (probably unfairly) to the great Albert Einstein: "Do not always follow the advice of the old; idiots grow old too."
So, in everything that follows here, I will do my best not to be the idiot who grows old. Grow old I certainly shall — no way around it; I only hope not to become an idiot as well. And while we are on the subject of quotations, Umberto Eco — who, unlike Einstein, really did say it — warned that the drama of the internet is that it promoted the village idiot to the rank of bearer of truth, with the same right to speak as a Nobel laureate. A Nobel laureate I am not. But neither am I the village idiot. Happy reading!
