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Dr Syed Abdullah Al-Haddad

Lessons & Reflections

Stories from a life in neurosurgery

Reflections from the clinic, the ICU, and a life in neurosurgery — the cases, the colleagues, and the moments that remind us why the work matters.

Patients Who Taught Me

A Giant Leap of Faith

Haji Ambotola sent me his own account of his brain tumour surgery days after the operation in February 2021. He passed away in November 2023 — and his words became something far more enduring than a post-operative note.

14 min read
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Patients Who Taught Me

The Beauty Within

Operating on the brain means seeing something almost no one else will ever see — a structure a few millimetres wide that holds a person's memories, speech and identity.

2 min read
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From the Operating Theatre

Where Human Certainty Ends

An eight-year-old arrived unconscious with fixed pupils and intracranial pressure approaching 80 mmHg. I shook my head at the paediatrician. I have never been happier to have been wrong.

4 min read
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Life in Medicine

The Interview Before the Interview

A candidate waiting outside the admissions room mistook me for a fellow applicant and spoke to me completely unguarded. His interview had already begun, and he had already passed it.

4 min read
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Patients Who Taught Me

Giving Colours Back to Her Life

A lecturer whose sight I had saved returned to clinic with a box of coloured highlighters. What she said as she handed them over made an ordinary gift priceless.

2 min read
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Faith and Gratitude

When I Could Not Answer the Call

Back pain left me on the bedroom floor for two hours, unable to reach the phone, forcing me to hand over a referral. What happened to that patient made me reconsider what a misfortune is.

4 min read
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Personal Reflections

In Loving Memory of My Father

My father's illness took his kidneys, his legs, his hearing and finally his sight. It never took his faith. From those lips we still heard Alhamdulillah.

4 min read
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From the Operating Theatre

The Promise I Made Before Surgery

I told a woman's son not to worry, that I would look after his mother. A six-hour operation on a petrous meningioma became ten hours of uncontrolled bleeding, and those words became a weight.

4 min read
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Faith and Gratitude

A Reflection for Myself

Called to review a man left ventilated after a collision with a lorry, I heard his young daughter ask him over a video call why he had not come home. He could only open his eyes and move his fingers in reply.

2 min read
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Personal Reflections · Fiction

The Traffic Jam

Two men sit in the same three-hour jam every morning for two years. One arrives home angry; the other learns Arabic. The traffic never improves, but one of them does.

2 min read
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Life in Medicine

What Twenty-Eight Years Has Taught Me

Three decades, thousands of operations, hundreds of trainees, a textbook and a training course spanning continents — and one lesson that outranks all of it.

1 min read
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Patients Who Taught Me

The Patient Who Initially Refused My Care

A mother asked for her son to be moved to another surgeon after meeting me. Weeks later I found him unresponsive with an extradural haematoma, and pushed his trolley to theatre myself.

3 min read
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From the Operating Theatre

Shared Decision-Making in the Operating Theatre

Midway through an awake craniotomy, a 77-year-old man told me his right hand was weakening. Stopping meant leaving the tumour; continuing meant taking his hand. Awake and lucid, he was the one person who could decide.

3 min read
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Life in Medicine

In Memory of an Extraordinary Colleague: Dr David Baxter

A Commonwealth Games medallist and Karolinska PhD who trained in Edinburgh while being treated for metastatic melanoma. He returned to the ward hours after neck surgery, saying only that it was time to work.

3 min read
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