His grandparents were from India. His parents were born in Africa. He was born and raised in London. His children were born in Memphis.
That’s four generations, four continents for Dharmesh Patel, MD, a cardiologist at Stern Cardiology Foundation. No one knows what the future may bring, but for now the doctor has roots firmly planted in a city that has been his home since 2004.
“I’ll be honest with you, I like Memphis,” Patel said. “I don’t have anything negative to say about it. It’s got the perks of being a city without the headaches of being a city, such as significant traffic. On the flip side, Memphis has been very good to me in terms of career. I like being here and I have no intention of moving.”
Patel came to Memphis originally because his wife, Purvisha, was doing her dermatology residency at UT Memphis. She now is the owner and a staff physician at Advanced Dermatology & Skin Cancer Associates in Germantown and Olive Branch. They met in 1996 in Charlotte, North Carolina, at an annual convention of Patels from around the United States (Purvisha was also a Patel). They were married in 1999 and have a son, Kushal, 8, and a daughter, Amrita, 5.
Dharmesh recalls his youth in London as a humble beginning, sharing living quarters with another family as well as sharing a room with his parents. His father was born in Uganda, his mother in Kenya.
“Things weren’t easy at times,” Patel said.
His mother worked for 35 years in banking at Barclays. His father was an accountant. Eventually his father acquired two Indian restaurants that Patel said were among the most famous in London.
“Growing up I was spoiled on eating very good Indian food,” he said. “We had guests like Freddie Mercury, the royals, all kinds of people.”
His parents were able to send Patel to London’s exclusive Emanuel School, founded in 1594 by Anne Sackville, aka Lady Dacre, whose great-grandfather, William Boleyn, was an uncle of the ill-fated Anne Boleyn.
At Emanuel, Patel was a standout academically and athletically. He was a house captain, a prestigious assignment, and led Emanuel to the equivalent of a league championship. His main sports were rugby and cricket. In the summer after his final year at Emanuel, Patel went on a world rugby tour, playing in Fiji, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.
Emanuel is coeducational now, but was all boys during Patel’s time there.
“I didn’t have too much exposure to girls until I went to university,” he said. “Maybe that’s one of the reasons I didn’t do very well my first year. Until age 18 it was all academics and sports, and getting into medical school was a big achievement. But that was when I started enjoying myself a bit more than I should have.”
He decided on a career in medicine at the urging of his father.
“I think I wanted to be a trader,” Patel said. “But my dad said you can always do business as a doctor, but you can’t be a doctor if you’re in business. I think in retrospect he was right.”
After medical school in London, Patel came to the United States for internship at the Medical Center of Delaware, for residency at the University of Virginia and for a cardiology fellowship at Penn State before arriving in Memphis. Working in America, he said, “was always a thought, but meeting my wife was the pivotal point.”
“I was living paycheck-to-paycheck on a resident’s salary and supporting both my wife and me at the time. Those were very humble times.”
His primary focus now as a cardiologist at Stern is prevention of heart disease.
“Forty percent of people feel great the day before they die,” he said. “So we have to have other measures that can help us identify patients who are at risk.”
Patel is excited about a new advancement in controlling cholesterol levels.
“It’s called PCSK9s,” he said. “This is the first time in cardiology that we’re giving an injectable form of a cholesterol-lowering medicine, and the results are quite staggering. I have patients whose cholesterol has not been controlled for literally decades, and now their cholesterols are being halved if not reduced by 60 percent. It will change the way we treat lipids.”
The challenge to live a healthy lifestyle is one that Patel says he faces on a daily basis.
“You try to lead by example, and that’s why I work out at least two or three times a week,” he said. “That’s the reason I did Kilimanjaro, because you can’t preach what you don’t practice. I have a healthy lifestyle, exercise, eat well and try to make a difference.”
Ascending Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is such a daunting task, he and Purvisha trained for a year before tackling it last summer with two colleagues.
“It’s challenging to the very last day,” he said. “It’s a 20,000-foot hike, the largest free-standing mountain in the world. I was just relieved that we could make it to the top because I can understand why about 25 percent of people don’t make it.”
Patel called the event “life-changing,” but then he was reminded of something that was far greater in significance and danger. It was the birth of daughter Amrita in 2010.
“She was born at 23 weeks, at 1.5 pounds,” he said. “My wife broke her water at the clap of a thunderstorm that awakened us both suddenly. She said ‘I think I have broken my water.’ There was a point where I nearly lost my wife and my daughter in that whole process when my wife had such high magnesium levels she could not breathe. My daughter was in the Baptist Neonatal ICU for three months, but now she is as strong and feisty as they get. But that was probably the most challenging, scariest time I’ve ever had.”
Among the many awards Patel has won, he counts being voted a “top cardiologist in Desoto County” for two years in a row as his most satisfying, because the voting was done by patients.
“You go to work every day and I try to treat patients like family,” he said, “and for the patients to give you an award is the highest honor you can have.”
And now he has set himself another goal – to win a soccer game in 2016.
“I’m playing on a team and we’ve lost 15 matches in a row,” he said. “But we’re taking it seriously now – we’ve got a coach. That’s high on my priority list.”
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