Sisters

4.

Nicole

"Doctor, I'm leaving. Do you need anything?"

"I don't need anything Ana, you can go home. Thank you."

"Are you staying?"

"I have to look at some papers for surgeries tomorrow and get ready for them, I'll stay a little longer."

"Don't stay late, doctor, you can finish it in the morning."

"Don't worry about me, I'm used to it."

"I really admire you so since early morning you've been on your feet around the patients and now in the papers, and look what time it is."

"When's the first surgery tomorrow?"

"At three in the afternoon, but you have three patients scheduled before."

"Well, I have time to sleep a little longer in the morning."

"We both know it's not going to happen. You're a sick early riser."

"Don't worry, I'll be fine. Now run home so your husband doesn't complain to me again that I'm stealing his wife."

"Okay, here I go. Have a nice evening."

"Thanks, Ana, you too."

Ana is my favourite dental nurse and also the head nurse at the polyclinic. Ever since I only had a small dental office, she has been with me, and even today. When I manage the entire polyclinic, she is here. I have many educated sisters here, but she is the principal on my orders. She even quit her full-time job to come work for me, she is a faithful, honest and good person, and what I value most is being a big workaholic. Although she has a husband and two small children, she never neglected her job and not once in the few years she worked with me did she complain that she had to stay extended. And even in these cases when after a whole day of hard work she has to stay up late in the evening to finish all the work together with me.

This job is my life and my great passion. I do what I love and I really enjoy it, but sometimes I think Ana and Stephani are right, I work too much. I look at the clock ticking three hours after midnight and at the pile of unresolved papers in front of me. Sometimes I wonder where I got the strength for all this, but somehow I find it. I take a minute and then go back to the paperwork to finish as soon as possible and head home. Maybe my sister remembered I existed and maybe she cares about me, though I doubt it. She is now surely enjoying and dancing in some club with some crazy music, and you, Nicole, can die here at work from extreme exhaustion.

The second I think of Stephanie, Ana bursts into my office all panting and red.

"Doctor, come down urgently, we have an emergency!"

"What, an emergency! Ana so we're not an emergency centre." I say sarcastically.

"Doctor... it's your sister, come now."

"Stephanie..." My heart skipped a beat at the very thought that something had happened to her, so at the speed of light, I drew myself in the first hall where I had something to see.

My sister is drunk and dressed in a tight dress that reveals more than she covers, barefoot and fluffy as if she was fighting lions. She holds a tall blond guy with a bloody face and a shirt under his arm. As a maxillofacial surgeon, I have seen everything, so I wasn't much touched by the gauze full of blood on his face or my sister's worried expression as she looked at him. What hurt me was the fact that she was drunk and dressed as a street prostitute.