‘I wrote my MBBS exams with one eye shut’: A neurologist’s story of grit |
The eye condition that nearly ended this neurologist’s medical career became his greatest life lesson Some stories don’t stay with us because of what they changed. They stay with us because of what they revealed. That’s exactly the kind of story Hyderabad-based neurologist Dr Sudhir Kumar shared recently on X, and it’s the sort of thing that makes you pause mid-scroll and read it twice.It goes back to 1992, to his final year of MBBS, and to an eye that nearly derailed everything he’d worked for.
A dull ache that wouldn’t go away
Dr Kumar was in the thick of preparing for four subjects — ENT, Ophthalmology, Community Medicine and Forensic Medicine — squeezed into less than six months. Nothing about any of those subjects was impossible on its own. It was the sheer volume, crammed into so little time, that made the days long and the nights longer.Then, just before his exams, his left eye started aching. He brushed it off the way most students would. Too much reading, he figured. Maybe he just needed sleep. But the ache didn’t go away, and soon his eye was watering non-stop. A senior suggested it was probably just “Madras eye,” the common name for viral conjunctivitis back then, and he picked up some eye drops and moved on.Except it didn’t get better. It got worse — redder, more painful, and so sensitive to light that he finally gave in and saw an ophthalmologist.
Not conjunctivitis at all
The doctor examined him under a slit lamp and asked something Dr Kumar wasn’t expecting: did he have a history of ankylosing spondylitis? He did. He’d been diagnosed with HLA-B27-positive ankylosing spondylitis as a teenager, years before any of this.That single question changed everything. This wasn’t conjunctivitis, the ophthalmologist told him. It was a severe attack of anterior uveitis, a known and serious complication of his existing condition, and one that could threaten his eyesight if left untreated.The treatment was relentless by design — steroid drops every single hour, alongside another drop meant to keep his pupil dilated so the inflamed muscles inside his eye could rest. And then came the line he really wasn’t ready for: the doctor told him he should skip his exams altogether.It wasn’t bad advice. His eye was in genuine pain, watering constantly, and unbearable in bright light. Hourly drops, day and night, aren’t exactly compatible with sitting for a written exam. But skipping meant losing six months of medical school, and that was a price Dr Kumar wasn’t willing to pay.
Walking into the exam hall with eye drops on the desk
So he went anyway. Pens, admit card — and two bottles of eye drops that sat right next to his answer booklet through every single paper. Every hour, he’d stop mid-sentence, put the drops in, wait for them to settle, wipe his eyes, and pick his pen back up. He kept his left eye shut for most of it and wrote almost entirely relying on his right eye.The pain stuck around through every exam. So did he.By the time it was over, Dr Kumar knew his answers weren’t his best work. Illness had eaten into his preparation, and writing through constant pain isn’t exactly the recipe for a flawless paper. Even so, something in him felt he’d done enough. And he had — he passed comfortably, with marks he was happy with. A year later, after his finals in Medicine, Surgery, and Obstetrics & Gynaecology, his combined performance across both years placed him third in his entire class.
A lesson that outlasted the illness
More than three decades on, Dr Kumar says what stayed with him wasn’t the fact that he showed up to write exams with an inflamed eye. It was what the experience taught him about how life actually works. Plans fall apart. Illness, setbacks, and disappointments show up uninvited, usually at the worst possible moment. And in those moments, there really are only two choices — give in to the circumstances, or adjust and keep moving, one step at a time.His eye healed completely. The exams became a memory, then a story. But the lesson never really left him. He says that even now, whenever he sits across from a patient facing a tough diagnosis, he still pictures that exam hall from 1992 — one eye shut tight, two bottles of drops beside his answer sheet, and a student who simply refused to let his circumstances write the ending for him.As he put it himself, sometimes winning isn’t about having things go your way. It’s about not giving up when they don’t.Read the post here:
