The flight was cancelled. The train was cancelled. The keynote was not.
Saturday morning did not go to plan. Weather and wildfire smoke rolled in, and our flight from Washington National (DCA) to New York (JFK) was cancelled. Then our daughters’ train into the city was cancelled too. For a moment it looked like the whole day would unravel.
Instead, it became one of the most life-affirming days I can remember. The girls simply drove down and picked us up. Tania took the wheel, we pointed the car north up the New Jersey Turnpike, and somewhere between the toll plazas I put on a headset, kept my seatbelt firmly fastened, and delivered a keynote to ten cities across India — live, from the passenger seat.
The occasion was the DICWC Symposium (Dissemination on Innovative Approach in Complete Wound Closure), a digital broadcast anchored to physical centers in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Bhubaneswar, Vijayawada, Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune, Chandigarh, and Ahmedabad. My talk was “Complete Wound Closure: An Emerging & Innovative Approach in DFU.” Prof. Milind Ruke did the introduction; Prof. Vijay Viswanathan, Dr. Ashu Rastogi of PGIMER Chandigarh, and Dr. Sudhir Kulkarni convened a superb faculty around the science of topical esmolol and the wider practice of getting wounds to heal — and stay healed.
“Professor Armstrong of USC is the leading figure in the world in limb preservation, podiatry, and wound healing — to have him lecturing before us, even virtually, is a terrific honor.”
— Prof. Milind Ruke, DICWC Symposium
What I’ll remember most is what happened after the formal lecture. We went city to city for a panel discussion, and the questions kept coming — for more than an hour. Hyderabad to Chandigarh, Chennai to Kolkata, each center taking its turn. There is nothing quite like the energy of clinicians who genuinely want to do better for their patients, and it poured through the screen the whole way up the turnpike.
There’s a small metaphor buried in all of this that I can’t resist. Our field is about mobility — about keeping people moving, keeping them independent, keeping them whole. And here we were, quite literally moving, refusing to let a cancelled flight cancel the mission. Seatbelt on. Daughters in the back. Tania driving. Ten cities listening. Onward and upward.
When we finally wrapped, a lovely note came through: “Thanks a lot for the wonderful lecture and going beyond the allotted time. Have a safe journey ahead to NYC.” My reply was the only one that fit the day — “Onward and upward!”
Two decades in India — from PGI to Chennai, and everywhere in between
India has been a second intellectual home for a long time now. If you’re new to this work and want to trace the arc, here are a few waypoints across the years:
- The 2024 MV Viswanathan Gold Medal Oration (a lifetime-excellence honor), “The Diabetic Foot — the Way Forward,” at the Indo-US Conclave on Diabetic Foot Complications, Chennai.
- The inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award of the Diabetic Foot Society of India, Mumbai, September 2024.
- PODOCON keynotes across the years — “The Fetid Diabetic Foot” (Bengaluru, 2025), “Offloading the Diabetic Foot” (Mumbai, 2024), “Our Digital Destination” at IIT Delhi (2023), and “Building a Limb Preservation Program, Worldwide” (2021).
- Endocrine Society of India and DFSICON congresses in Chandigarh (2014, 2015) — where much of my India teaching first took root — and later chapters in Goa, Thiruvananthapuram, and Amritsar.
- The very first Multinational Diabetic Foot and Wound Healing Conference, “Toe and Flow: How Team Trumps Technology,” Chennai, 2009 — and a Convocation address to the National Diabetic Foot Education Program in Chennai in 2016.
More of the running commentary — talks, milestones, and the occasional detour like this one — lives here on the Diabetic Foot Blog and on my USC Keck faculty page. A short clip from this particular adventure is here.
Cancelled flights, it turns out, are just plot twists. Some of the best days start with the plan falling apart.
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