Diary of a House Officer/Intern

Chapter 1

Kinza stood impatiently waiting at the gates of the renowned Civil Hospital Karachi, waiting for her friends to arrive. The hospital had been built in 1898, during the pandemic of bubonic plague. She shuddered as the cold winds of January blew the dust and fallen leaves past her and the gates. The gates were towering overhead, giant steel rods with the black paint chipped on their edges and the golden lettering of Civil Hospital etched across, barely remaining. 

Patients and their family members would pass her by. Kinza was wearing her freshly bought white coat, iron pressed at home in the morning by her mother which she carefully had worn to prevent any creases. Whereas, the people that passed her by were jauntily clad in shades of gray and brown; some wore the traditional shalwar kamiz with an old dusty hoodie on top, while others wore sweaters tearing at the edges and wisps of thread pushing out. Kinza had covered her face with a face-mask since COVID-19, however, none of the hospital incomers seemed to pay any heed to it. Kinza had bought herself sneakers, as she had heard interns had to run around the hospital alot.  The people that passed her by barely had any slippers on their feet, many children ran barefoot, with some not even wearing a pair of trousers. The difference was quite stark, but it was not foreign to Kinza as she knew how poverty stricken the patients at this hospital would be. The hospital catered to the neediest of the needy, some would say it's better to die than to come here into the dirtiest, most unhygienic of conditions but many would in hopes of treatment.

Kinza noticed many men, including ward boys and staff smoking inside the premises of the hospital. Many substances were used on hospital grounds ranging from cigarettes to hash to paan/gutka/chalia and many more. It was of common use and nobody really cared. Men stared her down as they passed by, and ladies covered from head to toe in thick shawls, their burkas referred to as 'shuttle-cock burkas' by many of her class-mates hurried by. 

Kinza finally saw her friend Ayesha waving at her as Ayesha hopped out of her car and came towards Kinza. 'Lets go!' she said excitedly pulling Kinza with her inside the hospital grounds. Their first rotation was supposed to be Psychiatry (a department Kinza and Ayesha had only managed to get after serious bribing) because everyone wanted their first department to be the kind with the least amount of work. Their feet thudded across the stone-cobbled 100 year old ground as they walked inside. The ward was on the second floor right above the disgusting pediatrics ward where wailing of children could be heard outside the building. No elevators were built inside the hospital, so one had to trudge along the smallest staircase that could be built towards the 2nd floor. The staircase had paan spits, torn wrappers of chalia and unidentifiable wrappers strewn across. They had to push amongst the crowd to make their way, as various mothers tried to be the first to get to the pediatrics ward.

 Kinza could hear a lady arguing with the guard and hurling abuses at him. She couldn't discern much from it except 'harami mujhe andar janay day meri beti beemar hai' (Let me inside you bastard my daughters sick), while the guard firmly repeated, 'Round horaha hai koi allowed nahi hota, bahir khari raho' (Rounds are happening, no one can go inside). The woman banged against the gate shouting but the guard shook his head and remained unbothered.