21/06/2026
I never wanted to be a father.
For a long time I was certain of it. I’d seen what fatherhood could look like, and I didn’t want anything to do with it. It wasn’t for me. I wanted a different life, fancy restaurants, first-class air travel, a sports car, an apartment in a big city with a view.
My own father died when he was a year older than I am now. Before that, he had struggled, with drink, and with a quieter kind of diminishment.
He had been someone back in Sri Lanka. Respected, educated, a man with status, known. Here, far from all of it, he slowly became a smaller version of himself, and I watched it happen, his health declining.
The repeated hospital visits, the cold medical interactions in a language I didn’t understand back then. By the time I was sixteen, before my GCSEs, before he knew I’d dedicate my life to being a different kind of doctor to the ones I’d met, he was gone. I decided, without ever quite saying it aloud, that I would not risk repeating him.
Then life did what life does.
I have four children now. Eighteen, fifteen, three, and seven months old. Supporting A-level revision for one son and weaning my other son off milk in the same evening.
The thing I was most afraid of has turned out to be the best thing I have ever done, and I’ve built a fulfilling career out of treating people with orthopaedic trauma and arthritis, so I don’t say this lightly.
They didn’t just give me a family, they gave me a reason, to get up earlier, to start training, to put the drink down, to look after the body I’d spent years neglecting, to become someone worth copying, rather than someone not to be like.
Everything I now do in orthopaedic longevity, every patient I gently advise to train, to sleep, to protect the decades ahead, I understood first by needing to be here for these four, and by understanding how important every day we have here is.
Children don’t need you to be perfect. They need you to be honest with them, to put them first, to show up again and again, and to still be standing when they’re grown.
To every dad doing the quiet, unglamorous work of staying present and healthy, around for the long version of the story — happy Father’s Day.
Arj
