Kieran Hirpara: A Cyberpunk Novel Made Him A Surgeon

Kieran Hirpara read William Gibson's Neuromancer as a kid and became fixated on one idea in it: robotic limbs. He wanted to design them. To design them he needed to understand the hand. To understand the hand he needed to be a surgeon. Other people ended up building the robotic limbs. He ended up with a career in upper limb surgery instead. Now practising in Rockhampton, Queensland, Kieran has a genuinely unusual path into orthopaedics behind him. His father, from a farming village outside Ahmedabad in Gujarat, joined the RAF as a medical officer, and the family moved with the postings. Three years in Germany, three in the Middle East, and boarding school in the UK in between. He did medicine in Ireland, missed out on the orthopaedic training scheme on his first attempt, and got in on his second. There is a substantial clinical discussion here that trainees and physiotherapists will find useful: why patients keep turning up with carpal tunnel syndrome after shoulder surgery, the mechanism behind it, and the sling related problems nobody warns you about. Kieran also explains why he left hand surgery behind, and what it was like to finish training in Ireland during a recession, into a hiring freeze, then start again in regional Australia where he had a full day operating list within three months. His closing assessment is honest rather than inspirational.