Midnight Round · Second Shift · Pulse Beat
At midnight, Ward 7 sounded like a ship in a calm. Fatima walked the length of it with a torch shaded by her palm, checking the drips, the charts, the long rows of sleepers. Twenty-eight beds, one…
At midnight, Ward 7 sounded like a ship in a calm.
Fatima walked the length of it with a torch shaded by her palm, checking the drips, the charts, the long rows of sleepers. Twenty-eight beds, one nurse on the floor and one on call. A man in bed nine muttered in his sleep. A girl in bed fourteen had kicked off her blanket, and Fatima tucked it back without waking her. Somewhere a monitor beeped, patient, steady.
She was twenty-nine. She had a diploma in nursing and a mother in Kurla who thought she should have married by now. In the pocket of her uniform, beside the thermometer, was a small spiral notebook with a rubber band round it. On the cover, in her own neat capitals: PHARMACOLOGY. NIGHT 1,142.
She finished the round, signed the chart, and sat down at the nurses' station, under its one yellow lamp, and opened the notebook. The ward breathed around her. It was the only hour of the day that belonged to her.