On Call

It's a Friday in hospital full of activity for me. The first thing I did in the morning was to make sure my fountain pen brims with ink, and my cup with coffee.

On your mark, get set, go.

Within minutes, my beeper was on full blast, and my footprints were all over the hospital.

This is a hospital, and there's no reason why we don't talk about death. Soon after my morning clinic, I joined a pre-inquest meeting for a coroner's case. Before long I had to rush to another hospital building where a patient had a cardiac arrest. By the time I finished the meeting, there were plenty of patient consultations for me to take care of. I didn't take lunch and tried to finish seeing them, lest they grew in number. When the debt grows, believe me, it grows like compound interest.

Soon I found out one of the neurosurgery patients had been seen by my colleague few days ago. I quickly turned to that page, and told the intern knowingly: "This, you should find my colleague to continue seeing your patient."

Not that passing the buck is an honourable thing to do. But everyone of us will probably do this once in a while. When I settled most of my jobs, an inner voice nudged me to get back to the neurosurgery patient. He wasn't seen by my colleague yet. That didn't come as a surprise. What surprised me is that the nurse in the neurosurgery unit came and handed me a fountain pen that I left behind in the morning. I was surprised, embarrassed, and brightened all at once.