DR DAOUD INGAR

Offer a second life

Working at the Centre de Chirurgie Esthetique de l’Ocean Indien was a great opportunity for me. I am a doctor but at the time, I had made the choice to forget medicine for a moment to help my family.

It’s a long story, which begins when I was a child. I was sick, I have a serious malformation of the heart. This was the very beginning of open heart interventions. All I know is that one of my friends had the same problem, and that he died of it. In the same hospital where I will be operated. He did not survive the operation. I would always remember this preoperative consultation where my mother asked the surgeon that they were my chances of survival. He told us: “50/50”. We looked at each other … And we decided to operate. And fortunately the operation was a success.

I was convalescing for a long time, and that’s when I took the decision to cure people. The impression of having a new life. So I became a doctor but life is not always simple. My mother raised her five children alone. Financially, it was very difficult. She had founded a small shop, the haberdashery of Mado. Gradually, she directed it towards perfumes.

Initially, it was my elder brother who managed it but he fell ill, and I came back to help with my other brother. Together, we have developed some point of sales, in Reunion Island and then in Mauritius. I was in charge of this zone, increasing the number of shops, with the help of my wife. But it was not medicine … That’s why I agreed to participate in the creation of the Centre de Chirurgie Esthetique de l’Ocean Indien. I found a place to express both skills. I became an expert in hair grafting, after my training in Canada before working in France.

We were the first to develop medical tourism. The beginnings were not simple. But we made sure we never neglected our values such as solidarity. Let the teams be really welded and collaborate. Then, to keep our status of pioneers in all our practices. And most importantly, honor first of all the patient, so that they feel good. Physical defects may seem trivial but they are often the source of deep moral sorrows, and limitations imposed by people. Freeing them from these constraints often leads them to reconsider what they are capable of.

Today, we can be proud of what we have built, because the Center reflects these: a permanent technological innovation, and above all, the possibility of offering a new life to our patients, Life that was offered to me.