FIRST PERSON: Cwmbran GP Dr Ramesh Sharma

“I WAS born in Ranchi in India in 1949.

I was the second youngest of six, with three brothers, Mithileshk, Akhilesh and Mahesh, and two sisters, Savitti and Manju.

My father, Raghaw, worked in the civil service and we had a very good life. He worked with the Inland Revenue and it was a lovely upbringing.

He started working in 1939 under British rule and continued working until 1976. He was from a farming background but always wanted to work in an office.

I can’t say a bad word about him. He was big on education and being educated first before anything else.

My mother, Radha, had a basic education and couldn’t speak English. In the 1920s and 1930s, girls didn’t go to school in India.

She was only 13 when she married, while my father was 18. She lived with her parents until she was 16/17 and then moved in with my father.

In those days it was very common in India to marry so young and her family didn’t let her study. She had to look after the house and bring us up, but my father gave her a very good life.

I studied all my life in Patna, from kindergarten to qualifying as a doctor. My father put all of us in boarding school in Patna as he was always travelling around.

I was about 10 when I went to Patna College and stayed there until I was 16/17. There were around 500 of us there.

I loved biology and hated maths, and loved playing cricket and billiards at school.

In Year 8, at the age of 12, you decided what subjects you wanted to take further and I went for physics, chemistry and biology. I knew I wanted to be a doctor.

I used to love dissecting animals and the human body. I was always intrigued by it.

I was never scared by blood and my temperament suited it.

I used to look up to doctors and vowed one day to be like them and serve the people.

I went to the Prince of Wales Medical School in Patna from 1966. It was located close to the River Ganges and every ward at the hospital had a view of it. It was beautiful.

I did one year of pre-med there in 1966 and spent five and a half years there in total.

The teaching was completely different compared to now, where you have multiple choice questions. You had to learn everything by heart and write it all like an essay back then.

There was a lot to learn: pathology, pharmacology, preventative social medicine, biology, physiology, forensics, gynaecology, medicine, surgery, and ENT.

The first two years were spent dissecting the whole body from the top to bottom, before ward work from the third year.

The teachers were all local but had all gone to the UK at some point. It was so modern and of the 173 students in my year, 73 went to the UK. Of those 73, 35 are still in the UK; a handful went back to India; and 20-25 went to the USA. My close friends all went back.

In August 1976 I moved to London and I thought I would also come back.

It was completely different. The instruments, the fact it was all free...I was shocked, it was much better.

Of course, India had been under British rule between 1858 and 1947. I grew up after that and after 1947 there was real justice.

The British ruled in a good manner: the systems were in place and the cities were clean

I used to love fish and chips, and before independence, British clubs were only open to the British or Indian civil servants. That changed with independence.

In Britain, the staff were so caring; in India, we still boiled the instruments and catheters.

In India, there were never queues and it was like landing in some other world.

In the UK, they thanked people for every little thing and the junior doctors helped me along to observe and adapt.

My wife, Poonam, joined me in London in 1977. We had an arranged marriage. One or two boys find love themselves, but I trusted my mother and father.

Poonam was a nice pretty girl and we got married in 1975. It was a huge ceremony in Dhanbad, her hometown, with 700-800 people there. It was a five-day celebration and a really nice day.

As custom, her face was hidden by a sari so it was really nice to finally see her after the ceremony. She was 18 and I was 26.

I had only met her once, two years previously, and she was so smart and lovely.

We went on to have two children, Simmi in 1976 and Melanie in 1978. They’ve done so well in life.

Simmi is a doctor and Melanie is a lawyer.

By the time they were born, I had served as a junior doctor at the Wilson Hospital, Queen Mary’s Hospital for Children, Epsom Hospital, Princess Alexandra Hospital, and St Peter’s Hospital in London.

We had to settle down and working under Dr Derek Scourfield in Pontyberem, near Llanelli, was like a homecoming in 1981.

In London, no one talked to each other and I felt like I belonged in Wales.

Most kids there spoke Welsh so I had to learn it by myself. When I went to Cwmbran, a year later, no one spoke Welsh so my Welsh soon left me.

Dr Scourfield was like a godfather to me and went on to lend me the deposit for my house in Cwmbran. I’ll never forget that.

It has been tough coming to Cwmbran.

When I took over at Fairwater, there were only 3,300 people registered, which was very low for a three-doctor practice.

It wasn’t until 1987 that I really turned it around through hard work in the community.

More than 25 years later, I’m happy to retire, but very sad to leave them after 33 years. I’ve always gone out of my way to help them in any way I can.

They have been so welcoming and accepted me as one of their own. I was born in India but made in Cwmbran.

Every day people are coming in to say goodbye and some of them might have only been a baby when they first met me.

It’s heartbreaking, but life goes on.

I’ll be hibernating for two months from April 30 and plan to go away to Cambodia and Vietnam sometime in the future.

All I can do is thank all my patients, who really, really loved me.

I don’t know how to thank them, but I just have so many good memories to take with me into retirement.”