The year I sat my exams, my child was gravely ill. I sat them anyway. I failed, and I have never once been able to feel bad about that, because I knew exactly where my mind was, and it was in the only place it could have been.

There is a particular kind of impossible in trying to hold an entire profession’s worth of knowledge in your head while your whole heart is somewhere else, at a bedside, terrified, willing a small person to be all right.

I did get through, the time after. People congratulated me, and I thanked them. What I rarely said out loud was the truth of it: the exam was never the hard part. The hard part was being a parent and a doctor inside the same breaking moment, and finding that I had no choice but to be both at once.

I was an RMO when I first encountered him.

He was an inpatient with schizophrenia and several other mental health conditions. I was sent to the ward to review him, as junior doctors do. I had a list of things I needed to accomplish: take a history, perform an examination, assess his mental state, document my findings and move on to the next patient.

He was not interested.

He was guarded and passive-aggressive. He did not want to talk to me. He did not want me examining him. He barely wanted to acknowledge that I was there.

I remember trying to do what I had been trained to do. Ask the questions. Build rapport. Understand what was happening. Find out what he was experiencing.

Then, in a moment of clarity, he looked at me and said:

“You don’t even have psychosis. You don’t even hear voices. How would you know how I feel? You can’t even empathise with me. What’s the point? Go away.”

I was completely taken aback.

I had no clever response. No reassuring phrase. No piece of medical knowledge that could answer him.

I couldn’t tell him that I understood what hearing voices felt like, because I didn’t.

I couldn’t tell him that I knew what it was like to experience the world through psychosis, because I didn’t.

So I hesitated.

He saw it immediately.

“See? So go away.”

And I did.

Years passed.

I entered GP training through the AGPT pathway. I sat my exams. I completed my training. I saw thousands of patients with problems I had never personally experienced.

And eventually, I became a Fellow of the RACGP.

But that sentence never quite left me.

For years, I carried it.

It took me becoming a more experienced clinician to understand something that I could not have understood as that junior doctor.

He was right about one thing.

I had never experienced psychosis.

I still haven’t.

I don’t know what it is like to hear a voice that nobody else can hear. I don’t know what it is like to have your perception of reality disrupted by an illness that everyone around you tells you isn’t real.

But he was wrong about what that meant.

If I had to personally experience every illness before I could understand and treat it, I would be a very poor doctor.

I have never had appendicitis, yet I can recognise it.

I have never passed a renal stone, yet I can diagnose and manage renal colic.

I have never experienced rheumatoid arthritis, yet I can recognise the pattern of inflammatory arthritis and know when someone needs treatment and specialist care.

I have never experienced sepsis, thyroid disease, heart failure, cancer or any of the countless other conditions that I diagnose and treat.

Medicine would be impossible if experience were the prerequisite for understanding.

And that, eventually, became the lesson I carried from that encounter.

Empathy does not always mean saying, “I know exactly how you feel.”

Sometimes it means being honest enough to say, “I don’t know what this feels like for you.”

And then being curious enough to listen.

Knowledge can tell us what a disease does to the body. Training can teach us how to recognise it. Experience can teach us how to manage it.

But none of those things gives us the right to assume that we completely understand another person’s experience.

The job is not to have lived every life.

The job is to meet people where they are, recognise what we can, acknowledge what we cannot, and still care enough to walk alongside them.

That patient probably never knew what his words left behind in me.

He probably never knew that a sentence he threw at a junior doctor in frustration would stay with that doctor for years.

But I carried it.

Through medical training.

Through exams.

Through thousands of consultations.

All the way to Fellowship.

And perhaps that is one of the strange things about being a doctor.

We spend years learning how to diagnose and treat disease, while quietly accumulating fragments of the people who taught us how little we truly know about what it is like to live with it.

Some of those fragments are heavy.

But sometimes, if we carry them long enough, we realise they were not stones after all.

They were lessons.

And perhaps the deepest lesson he gave me was this:

You do not have to experience someone’s suffering to understand that it is real.

You just have to be willing to listen.