The Wards Again · Second Shift · Pulse Beat
In her third year, she returned to the wards, in a white coat. It was the same hospital, the same corridors. The same long grey building, with its smell of floor cleaner and boiled rice. But she…
In her third year, she returned to the wards, in a white coat.
It was the same hospital, the same corridors. The same long grey building, with its smell of floor cleaner and boiled rice. But she walked into Ward 7 as a student, with a stethoscope round her neck, and the night staff, who had known her as a nurse, looked up from the desk with a strange, shy, delighted expression.
"Doctor Sheikh," said the junior nurse, a girl called Rekha, with a wicked smile.
"Student," said Fatima. "Don't tell anyone."
She was assigned to Dr Menon's team. On her first morning round, a patient in bed nine, an old man with a chest infection, looked up at her and said, "Sister?"
"Not any more," she said. "I'm training to be the other one."
"Ah." He studied her face. "You'll be better than the rest, then. You know what the night is like."
She did not say anything. She checked his chart, listened to his chest, and wrote in the notes with careful, small handwriting, as she had written for six years, only now with a different signature at the bottom.