Treating fellow villagers for 20 years

The urgent telegram read: “My nephew Ahmet is entitled to attend the faculty of medicine at İstanbul University. I heartily congratulate him.” Tears

of joy rolled down the cheeks of his mother. Soon the news spread to the whole town. Returning home in the evening, Ahmet İlhan saw the women of the town waiting for him in front of the house. The first thing that came to mind was that they were waiting to congratulate him for passing the examination to attend medical school.

As he entered, he realized that the elderly people -- who were longing for the arrival of physicians in the town -- were actually waiting to be examined by him. He tried to explain to them that he had yet to start school and did not have the knowledge to treat them, but all in vain. “I promise I will come here and treat you after I become a physician,” he told them. Years later, he returned to the district of Bereketli in Tokat as a full-fledged doctor to find that all but one of those elderly people had died. Still he treated the last of those people. “Auntie, I came. Years ago, I promised to return after becoming a physician and treat you. See I kept my promise,” he told her. Then, the idea of staying in his hometown to serve as a doctor for his townspeople grew inside him.

When he was a small child, he had a fondness for literature, and he wanted to be a journalist when he grew up. But when he told his father about this idea, his father didn’t like it. “Do you want to go from one door to another just to sell papers?” he said. İlhan tried hard to convince his father, but his efforts were futile. Finally, he decided to be a physician to comply with his father’s desires. To see him as a physician was his father’s dearest wish. Actually, there was some justification for this since it was hard to find a physician in the town and five of the family’s children had died because they could not get medical assistance in time. “Ask any woman here, and she’ll tell you that she had four or five children. And if you ask how many of them died, you’ll learn that there are more kids who died than survived. Ask any woman aged above 50 and she’ll say that she has more dead children than living ones. A shortage of doctors was the main reason for children’s deaths,” İlhan says.

The story of İlhan starts here in village of Turaç in Tokat’s Bereketli district in 1981 and connects to the faculty of medicine in İstanbul. He changes his dream from becoming a journalist to becoming a physician. When he graduates from the faculty in 1987, he goes to Diyarbakır for his first appointment. But he remembers the elderly women who came to his house to be treated and to whom he had made a promise. He requests to be appointed to the village of Turaç, where he was born. He is transferred and finally returns to his village.

For two decades, he has been serving patients in his village, and everyone respects him. When you ask young children what they want to be when they grow up, they say, “I want to be a doctor,” but add, “like Uncle Ahmet.” İlhan says that he sometimes encounters funny situations. “Sometimes, they come, and I tell them they should go to Ankara or İstanbul. So they go and are treated by specialists or professors at big hospitals. But they return without buying the prescribed medicine. They ask me to check and approve the prescription. This is how much they trust me. If I tell them not to buy it, they won’t buy the medicine prescribed by a professor or a specialist,” he says.

İlhan started to work as a family doctor in Bereketli 20 years ago, and he believes that his patients trust him since he knows their individual and family histories. “I know which family suffers from which hereditary disease. Thus, it is easier for me to diagnose the disease and follow up the treatment I advise. And I attain better results,” he adds. His fame has spread, and he now has many patients. He says that with a nurse and a staff member, he treats about 15,000 patients a year. According to what he has found out, the number of people treated six years before he was appointed to the village was only 3,000 because the physicians or nurses previously appointed to this village would want to leave and be relocated elsewhere. İlhan works selflessly, and he sometimes returns home late at night. He also encounters funny moments with his patients. One day, he heard a knock at his door at night. His wife opened the door and told him a woman had come. The woman said: “Doctor, sorry for disturbing you, but I cannot go to the nurse as he is a stranger. I need to have this shot. You are one of us, and I treat you like my son. Can you give me the shot?” He couldn’t refuse her.

“There are numerous physicians who would die to be appointed to positions I am currently entitled to hold to, but I cannot go as I cannot leave these people behind. Many times, my friends have urged me to go to İstanbul and take the exams. But every time, I have managed to dodge them. Now, they have stopped investing their hopes in me. And I plan to finish off my work here,” he says. He notes that he cannot understand why a person who has taken the physician’s oath should resign in refusal to go to the place of his/her appointment even before seeing it.

We accompany İlhan as he visits his patients. People salute him as he moves through the freezing cold, carrying his bag on the snow-covered village roads. We arrive in Turaç, where he was born, and several children who are sliding down the hill come to meet us with their sleds. They rush to welcome İlhan. A chorus of demands is heard: “Ahmet abi, Ahmet abi, come sled with us?” He turns toward me, and asks, “Do you want to sled?” But I suggest taking a photo of them as they glide down the hill. Enthusiastically he climbs up the hill with the children and comes sledding down. The children try to overtake İlhan, but he is experienced at maneuvering sleds. “When we were young, we would sled down this hill,” he says. Returning the sled, we resume our travel to the house of a patient. When we step inside, an aged women lying in a bed next to the window tries to stand up. The glisten in her eyes is the biggest proof of her respect for the physician. After he is done with the checkup, we are bid farewell with thanks and invocations of God’s blessing. As we are leaving, İlhan says: “I cannot understand the physicians who insist on working half a day in İstanbul or other metropolitan cities. Is it really so unimportant to work just to get these people’s invocations of God’s blessing? When someone thanks me heartily, wishing that God bless me, I forget about my fatigue.”

Of course, not all of his memories have a happy ending. In his first years, he examined a small girl who came from a distance village. He wrote the prescription and told her mother to start using the medicine immediately. Two days later, the child’s health deteriorated and she died as they were bringing her to the health center. When the bad news arrived, he was shocked as the worst thing that happens to a physician is when he loses his patient. He wondered if she died because of a misdiagnosis. But her mother revealed the truth, saying that she could not buy the prescribed medicine because she couldn’t afford it. And the child died. But this came as another shock for İlhan because the death of a child because of a lack of money is more tragic. “Such events were turning points in my life,” says İlhan. He is still happy after working in this town for 20 years. For him, it is more precious to be one of the people than to be a hero.