“I called the nurse and said, ‘Where is Sister?’” The nurse’s answer instantly transformed his fear into overwhelming relief. “Oh,” she replied, “she’s sitting down eating her Akple for breakfast.”

Every surgeon has a first operation that stays with them forever.

For Mr. Bernhardt Kuma, it was not just the complexity of the surgery that etched itself into his memory, it was the terrifying moment the following morning when he believed his patient had died.

The year was 1965.

Fresh from his medical training in the United Kingdom, the young doctor had returned home and was posted to what was then Ho District Hospital in Adidome.

Although he had studied surgery and watched medical instruments being demonstrated, real-life responsibility was something entirely different.

“I had seen some instruments being used,” he recalls, “but I had never seen them used.” Then came the emergency that would define the beginning of his surgical career.

Only two doctors were on duty at the hospital, an American physician and the young Ghanaian doctor. They alternated emergency calls. One day, a pregnant woman was rushed into the hospital in critical condition.

The situation was immediately alarming. “The upper limb of the baby was sticking out,” Professor Kuma remembers. The experienced midwife took one look at the patient and quietly voiced her fear.

“She said to me, ‘Doctor, I think she has ruptured her uterus.’” There was no time to hesitate.

Trusting both the midwife’s judgement and his own training, Dr. Kuma opened the woman’s abdomen. The diagnosis was correct. “She was right,” he says. “There was a tear in the uterus.”

What followed was the longest half-hour of his young professional life. “For half an hour I was trying to close that tear.”

Eventually, he realised there was only one way to save the woman’s life. “The only alternative was to remove part of the uterus,” he says. “Which I did.”

The operation ended. The patient was taken to the ward, and the exhausted young surgeon could do nothing more than hope.

The next morning, before beginning his outpatient clinic, Mr Kuma went straight to the ward. He wanted to know whether the woman had survived. But when he reached her bed, it was empty.

“I panicked,” he admits. His mind immediately raced to the worst possible conclusion.

He turned anxiously to one of the nurses. “I called the nurse and said, ‘Where is Sister?’”

The nurse’s answer instantly transformed his fear into overwhelming relief. “Oh,” she replied, “she’s sitting down eating her Akple for breakfast.”

Professor Kuma smiles as he remembers the moment. “If you can eat Akple then you have recovered”, he remarked

The woman had survived. What had begun as a terrifying emergency had become his first major surgical success.

For the young doctor who had feared he had lost his very first major patient, finding her alive and eating breakfast the next morning was more than good news.

It was the moment he truly became a surgeon.