Unusual Short Story – COMPULSORY ROTATORY RESIDENTIAL INMATE
Photo credit: krosseel from morguefile.com
He was walking aimlessly through an empty corridor of the familiar hospital. Admission days could really get into your head. Being an intern was tougher than he had imagined. He had not slept for 30 hours now. Double admission day! A gift you get in ortho postings. He did not feel like a smart, powerful doctor anymore. He was only an inmate, confined to the hospital.
He forgot where he was heading. Then he remembered. Yes. He needed to find a place to sleep. He looked around. The writing on the wall said he was on the first floor. “How did I become so disoriented?!”, he wondered. He laughed out loud. “Seriously?!”, another voice in his mind asked. He decided to go sleep in the x-ray room. The room had A/C after all.
The x-ray room was not crowded. “No new admissions. Thank God!”. He approached the room where the x-ray technician sleeps. He pushed open the door. The technician, Manohar, was sleeping. He slowly sat down on a chair trying not to make any noise. But the chair creaked. The sound seemed too loud in the silence. Loud enough to disturb the poor guy’s sleep. ” Who is there?”, Manohar asked.
“It’s me. The intern. I came to sleep for a while.”
“Who is there?”, Manohar asked again, louder.
It’s the house surgeon!” He said in a higher pitch. He was irritated. Is the guy deaf? The lack of sleep had added an itch to his usually calm nerves.
“Who is it?”, Manohar was on his feet, squinting into the darkness of the room.
He was losing his temper. He walked straight up to him and shouted, “House surgeon! Came for some sleep!! Are you freaking deaf?!”
Manohar stared blankly at his nose, almost like not wanting to meet his eyes. The guy scratched his head and muttered, “I must have imagined the noise.”
He lost it at that point. His anger stopped logic from expressing itself. He clasped the guy’s throat with both hands and pushed him to the wall. Squeezing with all his might, he kept screaming, “You are deaf? You are deaf? You are deaf? You are deaf???!!!”
A tiny voice in his mind spoke, “You are killing that person.”
Another sly voice replied, “He asked for it.”
The first voice said, “Come on! Chill dude!”
He let his hands loose and left the guy. Manohar slumped on to the floor.
“Manohar?” He sat down next to the immobile form on the floor. Being the doctor he was, he immediately checked for a pulse. There was none. He started panicking.
“Oh God! What have you done?”, the first voice said in a condescending tone. ” You are a doctor. Try to resuscitate him!”
“Don’t bother. You were always a killer, not a life giver”, the second voice said happily.
“Shut up, you both!”, he screamed into the night. The second voice sniggered. Ignoring that, he made Manohar lie flat on the floor. He tore open the shirt and started frantically pushing on his chest. Elbows straight, over the sternum, push with the weight of the body; he remembered. One two three four five…..thirty. Close the nostrils, breathe air into the patient’s mouth, and watch for the rise of the abdomen. He kept doing it. After 20 minutes, when the pulse was still not there, he screamed out in frustration and pounded on the body’s chest. Finally, he gave up. He crawled away from the body and sat down with his back against the wall.
He had a feeling that something was missing. Something out of place. Not the dead person next to him. Something else. Something odd about him. He couldn’t quite place a finger on the perturb.
Slowly it came to him. After such exertion, he should be taking deep breaths. His lungs should be straining to maintain the higher demand for oxygen. And his heart too, should be beating frantically, trying to push out more blood in a lesser time. He did not feel those. In fact, he was not even breathing. He felt dizzy. Slowly, he felt for his own pulse. Nothing on the radial. Then he tried to feel the carotid pulse. Nothing there either. He slowly got up. All his emotions were at their peaks. But with his body not responding to those emotions physically, he felt calm at the same time. He slowly stood up.
“I am dead.”, it was a statement. Not a question. He looked at himself. His hands were covered in blood, dry caked blood. “I strangled him. He did not bleed. What is this?”, he thought.
” It’s your blood, Dumbo!”, the second voice in his mind chirped.
“Yeah, it makes sense.”
The left half of his white coat was painted red. He took off his coat and unbuttoned his shirt. He let them both fall. He could see a deep stab wound over his left ribs, almost perfectly over his heart. His death must have been quick. He felt the site and found he had a broken rib too. That would have been a problem, hurting like hell every time he had to breathe, if he was alive. And he remembered. The short bad-tempered alcoholic he was treating. He had a cut on his forehead that needed suturing. He remembered how he had scolded that patient and asked him to lay still. He remembered trying to hold his head still. He remembered a stabbing pain in his chest. He remembered looking at that person’s eyes that were wide open and gleaming with anger. He had no memories after that.
“Oh.”, he thought. He only had to remember. While walking around, he was not going to remember that. He had to realise he was dead to get the memory of his death. He sat back down and realised that his eyes were still heavy due to lack of sleep, “Apparently, dead men also need sleep.”
X——————-X—————–X
He was walking aimlessly through an empty corridor of the familiar hospital. Admission days could really get into your head. Being an intern was tougher than he had imagined. He had not slept for 30 hours now. Double admission day! A gift you get in ortho postings. He did not feel like a smart, powerful doctor anymore. He was only an inmate, confined to the hospital.
He forgot where he was heading. Then he remembered. Yes. He needed to find a place to sleep. He looked around. The writing on the wall said he was on the second floor. “How did I become so disoriented?!”, he wondered. He laughed out loud. “Seriously?!”, another voice in his mind asked. He decided to go sleep in the biochemistry lab.
–END–
