I work as an emergency medical officer in the central Bir Hospital. We don’t have time for counselling. No one realises we don’t have time for a better lunch or for a sip of tea kept already on the desk.

Everyday as I enter the Emergency Department of the hospital forgetting the mischievous inner me, I am then an emergency medical officer welcomed with  greetings and smiles to make a good start. After handovers of respective patients, we  check the leftover investigations, follow up progress, add medications or hold some.

Then we have to deal with the lost pens, misplaced papers, documents and instruments, new cases, enthusiastic attendants and misguided OPD cases,  malfunctioning monitors, finished oxygen cylinders, broken wheels of wheelchairs.

As the patients and their attendants enter, their first question to whoever stays in the counter is for a wheelchair, if not they will ask for the availability of a bed.  I am sorry it’s not my job I tell them but since it’s a government hospital there’s no one else to attend I request them to look for one themselves seeking help from guards or adjust however possible.

I know their second approach to me would be to be addressed with “sister” overlooking the fact that I was a doctor.

One night as we were looking through the handover, a very well dressed man came and asked us “Nurse! You gave us some medicines, my patient is dying of pain, when’s the doctor coming to see.”

Our health assistant explained that  both of us were  doctors and his patient did not seem to be in pain anymore.

This is what being a girl in this field experiences.  It’s  a taboo in our society that male health personnel are considered doctors and females are not.

The health services that patients receive become incomplete without the health assistants, the nurses and their assistance is what is saving lives. Passing by every bed to soothe pain, drawing blood, subjecting self to risk of accidental needle pricks, breathing in the air around the open case of TB advising them to wear mask, running to help us resuscitate, they are worthy of respect.

We know that particular smell of alcohol, insecticide or kerosene intentionally or accidentally consumed, or sometimes we unintentionally smell the offensive smell of gangrene, that’s usually a rotting foot of a diabetic patient perfuming that particular corner in the emergency department.