Everything happens for a reason: How this doctor became a patient

With one phone call, Navin Vij went from seeing himself as a doctor to seeing himself as a patient. He was diagnosed with Hepatitis C, and he found out the source of his infection wasn’t the needle stick he had sustained a few days before. 

The first call he made after he found out was to his mother. 

“Standing in my green scrubs and one of those oversized sweatshirts from college, I stood there frozen. Scared, shaking, gripping my cell phone, and silently waiting for the words of warmth that only a mother could provide,” Vij says. 

In the weeks that followed, Vij got blood tests, saw specialists and dug into his medical records to discover where his Hep C came from. He began his six month treatment journey and struggled with one question — “Why did this happen to me?”

When his mother’s health started to decline, Vij reminded himself of the words she could no longer tell him, “Everything happens for a reason.” 

Listen to Navin Vij tell his story above at the “Stories From The Heart” story slam event from WHYY’s The Pulse and Annals of Internal Medicine.