Suppose a woman has blood drawn on a Monday morning and is told the result should be back in about three days. She is imagined, and so is the test, which I will leave unnamed; nothing in what follows depends on what it was looking for. What matters is that by Monday afternoon the answer to her question exists, or soon will, in a building she will never see, and that she cannot yet know it.
She has also, as it happens, chosen this week to repaint a small spare room. The paint was bought on Saturday, before anything else was on the calendar, and she sees no reason to waste the week. Printed on the lid of the can is the one piece of information in her life that comes with a precise interval attached: how long the first coat must dry before the second can go on. The paint knows its schedule. She finds that she envies it slightly, which is not a feeling she had expected to have about a can of paint.
I want to stay with her for three days, and I want to be careful about what I make of her. Writing about uncertainty has a way of making every hour heavy, of turning a person who is waiting into a person who is suffering, and then turning the suffering into a lesson. Most of her Monday is ordinary. She moves the bookcase into the hall, runs tape along the window frame and the baseboards, and spreads an old sheet over the floor. The question comes along on these errands the way a low sound from another room comes along on a conversation: unnoticed for long stretches, then suddenly the only thing she can hear. In the afternoon her phone buzzes in her back pocket with a number she does not recognize, and for the two seconds before she reads the screen, the whole week rearranges itself around a single possibility. It is a reminder about a dental cleaning. She laughs, mostly.
Those two seconds are what this essay is about. Not the result, which I will not reveal, because I do not know it and neither does she, but the interval, and the curious fact that it is so poorly described by the phrase everyone uses for it. She is waiting for the result. The phrase suggests a single thing at the far end of a single corridor. I have come to think that it is several things, at the ends of several corridors, and that a good deal of avoidable distress comes from treating them as one.
Pending #
In the medical record her week looks orderly. A test moves through a sequence of states, each stamped to the minute: ordered, collected, received, in process, and then, in medicine’s peculiar grammar, resulted, as in the test has resulted, a usage heard almost nowhere outside a hospital. After that comes reviewed, when a clinician has read it and signed. For many tests the analysis itself occupies a small fraction of the interval. Much of the rest is transport, batching, verification and the ordinary traffic of a laboratory working through a great many samples at once. None of this is carelessness. It is how a careful system handles volume. But the record has only one word for the state she is living in, and the word is pending. Pending is a status. It does not describe a Tuesday.
Look closely at what she is waiting for, and the single wait comes apart into at least four.
The first is the specimen’s wait: the time it takes for a tube of blood to become a number or a report. It belongs to couriers, machines and technicians, and it is the one people usually mean when they ask how long a result will take. It is also, in a sense, the least of her concerns. She cannot see it, cannot hurry it, and has no particular reason to want to.
The second is the report’s wait: the time between the result existing and the result reaching her. For most of the history of modern medicine this gap was decided by a clinician’s office, and could run to days or weeks. Now it is frequently decided by software, and may be a matter of minutes. It is the wait that has changed most visibly in recent years, and I will come back to it.
The third is the meaning’s wait: the time between seeing a result and understanding what it says about her. A number, a flag, a paragraph from a pathologist written for other physicians: none of these interprets itself, and the interpretation that matters is not general but particular, an account of what this finding means for a person with her history, her other results and her reasons for being tested in the first place.
The fourth is the plan’s wait: the time between understanding and knowing what happens next. A result may be perfectly clear and still leave open whether anything follows, who will arrange it, and when.
These waits can close in any order, and a system can close one while leaving the others open. The number can be visible while its meaning is not. A message can announce that a result is normal while the question that prompted the test, why she has been so tired since the spring, stands exactly where it stood. An appointment can be offered without anyone saying whether the interval before it is routine or worrying. Each of these is a result that has arrived without the wait having ended. The record, which knows only pending and resulted, cannot tell the difference. She can.
What she needs during each wait is different information. During the first, a rough sense of time. During the second, how the result will reach her, and whether she may see it before anyone else has. During the third, who will explain it, and in what form. During the fourth, who will act. Ask her on Monday afternoon what she is waiting for and she will say the result. Ask her on Thursday, and she may find she was waiting for a person.
Nothing to Be Done #
There is a play about waiting that most people know by its title, whether or not they have seen it. In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, first staged in Paris in 1953 and in London two years later, two men in worn clothes wait on a country road beside a nearly bare tree for someone called Godot, who has promised, or is believed to have promised, to come. He does not come. The Irish critic Vivian Mercier, reviewing it, observed that Beckett had written a play in which “nothing happens, twice.”
Nothing happens, but a great deal is done. The first words are Estragon’s, as he struggles to pull off a boot: “Nothing to be done.” Vladimir takes the remark as philosophy and answers it as philosophy; Estragon meant the boot. The joke is the play’s method in miniature. The waiting is filled with business, boots and hats taken off and inspected and put back on, turnips and a carrot rummaged from pockets, quarrels and reconciliations, a discussion of whether to hang themselves from the tree, all of it passing the time without touching the thing they are waiting for. Anyone who has waited for a result recognizes the texture. The woman’s tape and drop cloth are her boots and hats.
What I find most instructive, though, is not the business but the conditions under which it is carried on. Vladimir and Estragon are not sure they are in the right place: was it this tree they were told, or some other? They are not sure of the day: was it Saturday, and is today Saturday, or Sunday, or Friday? They do not know what Godot will do when he comes, or what they will do. Their wait has no edges. There is no time they can count on, no place they can verify, no person they can describe, and no account of what follows.
And at the end of each act a boy arrives with a message. Mr. Godot will not come this evening, but surely tomorrow. In the second act the boy, or another boy, tells Vladimir that he has never been there before. The messenger brings news, but it is news only about the wait, never about its object, and the promise it carries is renewed every evening without ever being kept.
I do not want to flatten a great and strange play into a lesson about clinic communication. It has been read as a parable about God, about the war Beckett lived through in France, about the human condition in general, and it slips out of each reading as soon as it is pinned to it. But read beside the woman and her paint, it isolates something that the language of turnaround times does not. The cruelty in the play is not the length of the wait. It is the wait’s shapelessness, and the unreliability of the only voice that speaks about it. The boy is polite enough. He simply has nothing to offer but tomorrow.
The Promise Before the Test #
That is why I have come to believe that the most honest reassurance available before a result is not a guess about the result but a description of the wait. Roughly when she will hear, and by what route. Whether she may see the number before anyone has explained it. Who will explain it, and how: a message, a call, a visit. What happens next if the answer is one thing, and what happens if it is another, at least in outline. And what she should do if the promised day comes and goes in silence, because promised days sometimes do.
None of that shrinks the question. It gives the days edges. A person can live inside a wait with edges far more easily than inside one that seems to have none. It is the inverse of the boy’s message: specific where his was vague, and, above all, kept.
Specific promises carry a risk of their own. A promise of timing that a practice cannot honor produces more uncertainty when it fails than a modest promise would have done. You’ll hear tomorrow becomes, at five o’clock the next day, a silence with a meaning. Has something gone wrong? Is the result bad, and is someone deciding how to say so? In fact the laboratory was simply busy. A sturdier promise is often less precise and more honest: an ordinary range of time, the things that can stretch it, the route by which the answer will come and the route by which she can ask if it does not. A promise of instant availability that cannot be kept is worse than a promise of three to five days that can.
Some waits cannot be given a reliable length at all. A specimen may have to travel to a distant reference laboratory; a culture takes as long as the organism takes to grow, or to fail to grow; a pathologist may want additional stains, or a colleague’s opinion, before committing to a word. In those cases the honest description of the wait says so, and says why. I can’t tell you exactly when this will come back, and here is the reason is still an edge, of a kind. It also tells her something she badly needs to hear: that the length of the wait carries no information about the answer. A delay is the thing people most naturally read as a sign, and most often read wrongly.
A promise about the process must also not turn into a prediction about the result, and the pull toward that comes from both sides of the desk. The patient asks, as she is putting on her coat, You don’t think it’s anything, do you? The clinician, who would like her to have a good week, is tempted to answer. Sometimes there is a truthful answer that helps: the test is being done to exclude something unlikely, and saying so is accurate. But often the honest answer is the reason the test was ordered, which is that nobody knows. A guess offered as comfort borrows against the result. If the result is reassuring, the guess looks like wisdom. If it is not, she loses twice: once to the finding and once to the earlier sentence, which now has to be taken back.
Her sister telephones on Tuesday evening and says, I’m sure it’s nothing. It is kindly meant, and the sister may even be right. But it is a sentence nobody in the conversation is in a position to say, and its kindness carries a small cost: it asks the person who is waiting to perform relief on behalf of the person reassuring her. She thanks her sister. Both of them can hear that it has not helped much. What might have helped is something less confident and more companionable. Tell me when you hear. I’m free on Thursday. That too describes the wait instead of guessing at its end, and it has the considerable advantage of being true.
The clinician waits as well, in a sense, though not in the same way. For the person who ordered the test, this result is one among very many that will be read, signed and filed in the course of ordinary afternoons. For her it is the only one. That difference in proportion is nobody’s fault. But a physician tempted to describe three days as only three days should keep it in mind, and so should any system that measures itself in turnaround hours. The hours are real. They are not the whole of what is being measured.
When the Portal Speaks First #
By Tuesday the phone has migrated to the windowsill, face down, a compromise between keeping it in her pocket and putting it in a drawer. There is also the portal to consider.
Since the information-blocking provisions of the 21st Century Cures Act took effect in April 2021, many health systems have released results to patients’ online accounts as soon as they are finalized, often before any clinician has seen them. The rules have narrow exceptions, and a clinician’s wish to speak first is not, in general, among them. Patients, asked, mostly want it this way. In a survey of more than 8,000 portal users at four academic medical centers, published in JAMA Network Open in 2023, 96 percent preferred to see their results as soon as they were available, even before their clinician had reviewed them. Among those whose results were not normal, 17 percent said that seeing them first had left them more worried, against 5 percent of those whose results were normal.
I find both halves of that finding persuasive.
The case for immediate access is not merely procedural. A person’s results are about her. The old arrangement, in which a result sat in an office until someone found time to telephone, placed the clinician’s schedule between a person and the facts of her own body, and the history of medicine holds enough well-meant withholding to make anyone wary of a system that decides on a patient’s behalf when she is ready to know. People also use their information. They notice that a result has not appeared, and chase it. They notice a value that has drifted over years, and ask about it. They arrive at the next conversation having read, with a question already formed.
Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) is the record of a winter in which her daughter lay critically ill in hospital and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly at their dinner table at the end of 2003. She met those catastrophes the way she had been trained all her life to meet trouble, by reading: the medical literature, the vocabulary of the intensive care unit, the terms the doctors used among themselves. “Information was control,” she writes. It is easy to smile at that, and wrong to. For many people the ability to see is itself a form of steadiness, and to deny it to them in the name of protecting them is a kind of theft.
The case for context is equally serious, and it is not paternalism in disguise. A number arriving alone, at whatever hour the laboratory finishes, can be a lonely way to learn something. Tests are not alike. A cholesterol panel and a pathologist’s report on a biopsy travel the same digital road under the same rules, but they do not weigh the same, and the second may contain a word that a patient reads at eleven at night, alone, with nobody to ask what it means for her and every search engine eager to tell her what it has meant for someone else. The 17 percent in that survey are not a rounding error. They are people for whom the second wait closed suddenly and the third opened wide, in the dark.
Didion’s own book, read to the end, is partly an account of what reading could not do. She learned the words, and the words did not tell her which of the possibilities was hers. Information is control only when it can be interpreted, and interpretation, for most people and most results, needs another person.
So on Tuesday she refreshes a screen, twice, then makes herself stop and goes back to the roller. I do not think the answer to the tension is to choose a side. It is to stop treating access and support as rivals. The right to see a result early is not an obligation to see it alone, and a system that releases results promptly owes something in return: a plain statement, before the test, that the result may appear before anyone has looked at it; an idea of when and how someone will; and a way to ask. Some people, told this, will open the portal the moment it chimes. Others will decide to wait for the call. Both are exercising the same right, and neither should have to discover the arrangement by accident.
Penelope’s Loom #
People wait differently, and nothing I have said should be read as a prescription for how they ought to.
Some check. They refresh the portal on the hour, call the laboratory, ask whether the sample arrived. To an observer this can look like anxiety, and sometimes it is; it can also be a reasonable vigilance in someone who has learned that results occasionally go astray. Some postpone. They know the result is there and decide not to open it until they can sit with someone, or until after a birthday, or until Monday. Some talk, telephoning everyone and rehearsing every possibility aloud, and find the wait smaller for having been shared. Some go quiet. And some, like the woman with the paint, keep busy, and are occasionally reproached for it, as though attention to a window frame were a failure to take the matter seriously.
The postponers are the most often misunderstood, and the oldest story I know about deliberate waiting belongs to them. In the Odyssey, Penelope, besieged by suitors through the long years of her husband’s absence, tells them she will choose one of them once she has finished weaving a shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, against the day of his death. By day she weaves. By night, by torchlight, she unpicks what she has woven. The ruse holds for three years, until one of her maids betrays her and the suitors catch her at it. The poem tells the story three times, once in the mouth of a resentful suitor, once by Penelope herself to a stranger who is in fact Odysseus, and once by a dead suitor in the underworld, and each telling admires or resents the same thing: she found a way to hold an interval open.
What Penelope understood is that the end of a wait is not only the arrival of an answer. It is the arrival of an obligation. Once the shroud is finished she must choose. Her unweaving is not denial; she knows precisely what is happening in her house. It is a way of holding the moment of decision at a distance until she can meet it on terms she can bear, and it costs her labor every night. The person who leaves a portal notification unopened until morning, when someone can be beside her, is doing something similar, and it is not cowardice. A right to know includes a right to choose the hour of knowing.
There is a further detail in the story that I find unexpectedly exact. The shroud is for a man who is still alive. Penelope is weaving, in advance, the cloth for a death that has not happened. People waiting for a result do this too. They rehearse. They compose, privately, the sentences they will say if the news is bad, and imagine the calls they will make. Rehearsal is not pessimism, and it does not summon what it imagines. It is one of the ways a mind prepares, and like Penelope’s weaving it can be undone at night without anyone being the wiser.
Punjabi has a word for this condition: ਉਡੀਕ (uḍīk), waiting, and its verb ਉਡੀਕਣਾ (uḍīkṇā). The grammar is quietly instructive. In English one waits for someone; the person awaited stands at a little distance, on the far side of a preposition. Punjabi can take the awaited person as the verb’s direct object, as in ਮੈਂ ਤੈਨੂੰ ਉਡੀਕਦੀ ਸੀ, which a woman would say for I was waiting for you and which comes out, a little stiffly, as I was awaiting you. And its commonest noun phrase puts the waiting in the awaited person’s possession: ਤੇਰੀ ਉਡੀਕ, your waiting, means not the waiting you do but the waiting done for you. The wait belongs, grammatically, to the one who is expected. The songs of separation that run through Punjabi folk tradition are, in this sense, addressed songs. Whoever sings them is waiting for somebody in particular, not for news in general.
I would not build a theory of mind on a possessive pronoun. But the grammar points at something the phrase waiting for the result conceals. What the woman is awaiting, by Thursday, is not only a number. It is a voice that will tell her what the number means for her, and a person who will do what comes next. In the Punjabi sense, her wait belongs to them. A system that took that seriously would ask, of every pending result, whose wait this is, and who has agreed to end it.
The Interval That Changes #
A wait with edges can still change shape.
The promised day passes. The portal shows nothing, or shows pending, as it did yesterday. Here the four waits matter again, because silence means different things in each. Silence during the first usually means a busy laboratory. Silence during the second may mean a result sitting, unreleased, somewhere in the system. Silence during the third and fourth may mean that a result has been seen and nobody has yet settled who should explain it, and that is the silence that matters most and is least visible from outside. Research on test results that are never followed up is extensive and sobering, and its lesson is not chiefly that clinicians are careless. It is that responsibility for a result can dissolve at the seams between people, departments and software, each of which assumes another has it. A patient who chases a missing result is not being difficult. Often she is the last safety net in a system that should have had others.
That is not an argument for making her the safety net. It is an argument for telling her, before the test, at what point silence should become a question, and to whom she should put it.
The body, meanwhile, does not pause for the laboratory. A wait can be interrupted by a change in how she feels, and here I want to be careful, because waiting for one answer can distort the reading of everything else. One person may dismiss a new symptom because she is already being looked after, as though a pending test were a kind of coverage. Another may read every twinge as a preview of the result. Neither inference is sound. A test drawn on Monday answers the question asked on Monday; it does not watch over Wednesday. I will not offer rules for what a change should prompt. That is a conversation between a person and her own clinician, and it depends on everything this essay does not know. But I would want the arrangement made before the test to include it, in a sentence as plain as if something changes before you hear from us, here is how to reach someone. That sentence belongs in the description of the wait as much as the timing does.
On Tuesday night she lies awake for an hour, not because anything has changed but because the house is quiet enough for the question to be heard. She does what many people do at that hour, and tries to calculate, from the brisk or unhurried manner of the person who drew her blood and the tone of a receptionist’s voice, what is already known about her. Nothing is. On Wednesday morning she wakes calmer, for no reason she can name, and distrusts the calm a little. Both moods are hers. Neither is evidence.
Receiving Is Not Understanding #
Results do arrive, and it helps to follow one past the moment of arrival, because the story is usually stopped too soon. Since I am leaving the woman’s result unknown, consider a second hypothetical: a man in his fifties whose portal chimes on a Thursday evening.
The report is a list of values, most in plain type, one in bold with a small letter beside it marking it as above the reference range. The second wait has closed: he can see his result. The third has opened wide. He does not know whether the bold number is a small deviation of no consequence or the very thing the test was ordered to find. The reference range, printed beside it as though it explained everything, tells him only that he is outside the band where most healthy people fall, and he does not know that such bands are drawn so that a small share of healthy people will always fall outside them. He searches, and the internet, which does not know him, offers him a spectrum that runs from nothing to catastrophe.
On Monday a message arrives: Please schedule a follow-up visit to discuss your results. This is a real step. A clinician has seen the report; someone has acted; the fourth wait has begun to close. But the message says nothing about meaning, and its silence is eloquent in the wrong direction. Is a follow-up routine for a value like this, or a sign of concern? The message was written to be neutral and is read as ominous, because neutrality is what people expect bad news to sound like.
When the conversation finally happens, it does work that none of the earlier steps could do. The number takes its place among his other numbers and his history. It is compared with last year’s. It is connected, or not, to the question that led to the test. Whatever uncertainty remains is described as uncertainty, and the next step is named along with the reason for it. He leaves knowing what he knows and what he does not, and who will do what. That, and not the chime or the bold type or the message, is the end of his wait.
None of this is an argument against the chime. He would rather have seen the number on Thursday than learn on Monday that it had been sitting there all weekend, and most people would. It is an argument that delivery and understanding are separate achievements, and that a system which measures the first and assumes the second has stopped counting halfway. The record will log the result as reviewed once a clinician has signed it. There is no field for the moment the man in front of his screen understood what he was looking at. Perhaps there cannot be. But the absence of a field is not the absence of the thing.
What the Waiting Does Not Decide #
On the third day the woman cuts in around the window frame, the slow brushwork that painters leave for last because it needs a steady hand and complete attention. For forty minutes there is no room in her for anything else. Some hours of waiting are like that, absorbed and entirely ordinary, and they are not a failure to take the situation seriously. They are part of the life she is already living. An ordinary hour does not prove that the concern has gone away. A frightened one does not prove what the result will show.
I insist on this because waiting carries a temptation older than medicine, and Didion gave it the name in her title. In the months after her husband’s death she found herself behaving as though the event could still be reversed if she did the right things. She could not give away his shoes, because he would need them when he came back. She knew, as a rational adult, that he would not. The magical thinking ran alongside the knowledge without replacing it, and the book is remarkable partly because it does not shame her for it. It watches.
People waiting for results do something similar, and the culture around them encourages it. Stay positive, they are told, as though the mood of Wednesday could reach back into a sample processed on Tuesday. Some feel that worry tempts fate, and some that calm does. Some bargain privately. Some feel that a cheerful week would be presumptuous. Underneath all of it lies a sense that the waiting is a kind of examination, and that the result will be, in some measure, a grade.
It is not, and this may be the one piece of genuine comfort that can honestly be offered. The waiting does not decide the answer. Whatever the result will say was settled before she picked up the brush. Her worry on Tuesday night does not change it, and neither does her calm on Wednesday morning. The days in between alter only what she knows, and how long she must carry not knowing it. That cuts both ways, and both ways are a mercy. She cannot earn a good result by waiting well. She cannot deserve a bad one by waiting badly. Whatever comes, she will not have to wonder whether she brought it on herself by the way she spent the week.
An invitation arrives in the mail for a gathering five weeks away. She reads it twice and puts it on the refrigerator without replying. Planning next month while a question about one’s own body is open is a strange kind of arithmetic. Most people do it anyway, provisionally, in the same way they finish the room.
The Wall That Dried First #
By the afternoon of the third day the room is finished. She pulls the tape off the window frame in long strips, opens the window to let the smell out, and sits on the floor against the wall that dried first. The phone is on the sill, face down. It has not rung.
I will stop here, before it does. I have been tempted more than once to give her an ending. A reassuring call would make this a parable about needless worry; a grave one would make it a parable about the wisdom of fear. Either would misrepresent what waiting is. The result will not be a verdict on how she waited, and the essay should not pretend to be one.
What I can say is what I would want to have been true for her across these three days. That she knew roughly when she would hear and by what route. That she knew she might see a number before anyone explained it, and had decided for herself whether she wanted to. That she knew who would explain it and who would act. That she knew what to do if the promised day passed in silence, or if something changed. That the people around her asked less of her than a performance of relief. And that whatever arrives, she will not be left alone with it, holding a fact she has been given and not yet helped to understand.
None of that is a prediction. All of it can be promised. Whatever the result says will be hers to hear first. The paint, at least, has done exactly what the can said.
Evidence and Editorial Note #
Documented findings. The essay relies on the author’s public biography as a family physician practising in California since 2010. The information-blocking provisions of the 21st Century Cures Act, with a compliance date of April 5, 2021, under which many health systems began releasing results to patient portals promptly, and the existence of narrow regulatory exceptions: standard regulatory reference knowledge, stated in general terms. Steitz BD, Turer RW and colleagues, “Perspectives of Patients About Immediate Access to Test Results Through an Online Patient Portal,” JAMA Network Open, March 2023 (8,139 respondents at four academic medical centers; 96 percent preferring immediate release; 17 percent of those with results that were not normal reporting more worry, against 5 percent of those with normal results): the study as reported in its institutional news release on EurekAlert. The sequence of test statuses in an electronic record and the intransitive clinical use of resulted: general clinical usage. That reference ranges are drawn so that a small share of healthy people fall outside them, and that research on unfollowed test results points to responsibility lost between people, departments and systems: standard reference knowledge. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (first staged in Paris in 1953 and in London in 1955): the opening line, the business with boots, hats and vegetables, the uncertainty about place and day, and the boy’s message at the end of each act, from the published play, with one short quotation. Vivian Mercier’s remark that nothing happens, twice: his 1956 review in The Irish Times, as widely cited. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005): the death of John Gregory Dunne in December 2003 during their daughter’s critical illness, her habit of answering trouble by reading, and the shoes she could not give away, with one short quotation. Homer, Odyssey: Penelope’s weaving and unweaving of Laertes’s shroud, told in Books 2, 19 and 24. The Punjabi ਉਡੀਕ and ਉਡੀਕਣਾ, the direct-object construction and the possessive ਤੇਰੀ ਉਡੀਕ: standard Punjabi usage. Vendor representations. None. No laboratory, portal or record system is named or assessed.
Recollection and tradition. The woman, her test, the painted room, the dental reminder, the sister’s call, the sleepless hour and the invitation are hypothetical and illustrative, as is the man who sees a flagged value in his portal; they do not describe real patients, real results or any event in the author’s life. No turnaround standard, diagnosis, risk estimate or outcome is asserted, and the imagined result is deliberately left unknown. The account of what honest reassurance before a test should include is a statement of present conviction, not a report of any particular conversation. Punjabi usage and folk song are described as general cultural knowledge, not as a claim about any family.
Analysis and forecast. The division of the wait into four, the readings of Beckett, Didion and the Odyssey, the remarks on Punjabi grammar, the argument that access and support are not rivals, and the view that waiting does not decide a result are the author’s personal interpretation as of November 6, 2026. Independence. This essay is not sponsored by any institution, company, health system or technology developer. It is personal reflection, not medical advice; readers seeking care should contact their own physician’s office.
About the Author #
Kanwar Partap Singh Gill, MD, traces his family roots to Khadur Sahib in Punjab’s Majha region and grew up in Amritsar. He attended Spring Dale School and completed pre-medical studies at Khalsa College in 1994–1996. He earned his MBBS from Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Amritsar in 2002.
He completed PGY-1 at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock in 2007–2008, and PGY-2 and PGY-3 with UCSF Fresno at Community Regional Medical Center from 2008 through 2010. He has practiced medicine in California since 2010.
His career has crossed four distinct information eras: predominantly paper-based medicine, early and fragmented electronic records, the integrated-EHR era, and the emerging age of generative and agentic artificial intelligence.