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The Overflow

No empty beds tonight.

No silence.

No rest.

Stretchers jammed into corridors.

Chairs stolen from the doctors’ room,

dragged to hold

the overflow of bodies.

The air thick,

antiseptic, sweat and the sour breath

of too many people

in too little space.

Relatives pressed forward,

eyes wild,

voices colliding

into a single desperate cry.

This was no sanctuary.

It was a market of pain.

A courthouse of petitions.

A theatre of desperation.

Alive.

Swollen.

Overflowing.

And into this tide

walked a man with a headache.

Just a headache,

they said.

But his words fell apart

before they reached meaning.

Fragments, irrelevant, broken.

A vessel already torn open.

An intracranial bleed

disguised as banality.

And across the hall,

an old man gasped for air.

Chest heaving against itself,

lungs barricaded,

each shallow breath a plea.

Severe asthma.

Air locked out.

Oxygen begging at the door.

One drowning in blood.

One drowning in air.

And me,

torn between them.

The Noise

Around us,

the theatre raged on.

A man howled that his abdominal cramps would kill him.

A relative banged the counter,

curious about a fever left unattended.

Another demanded priority,

because “connections” deserved speed.

Kafka would have smirked.

Here was his stage.

Pain turned into petitions,

fear paraded as entitlement,

the illogical performed under flickering lights.

Noise.

So much noise.

And in that noise,

death whispered softly.

Almost unheard.

The Shoulders

Not every battle was mine.

My resident waded into the flood.

She took the fevers,

the cramps,

the bruises,

the invented ailments.

She gave weight to the trivial,

dignity to the petty,

attention to the loud.

Because in their world,

a fever was a crisis,

a cramp an ending.

And in the corner,

a woman sat silent,

wrist bent, swollen,

a distal radius fracture.

She waited.

Not impatient.

Not demanding.

Her quiet more dignified

than any of the shouting.

Her pain was real.

But she knew

that urgency is not fair,

it is rationed.

The bleed worsened.

The old man suffocated slowly.

I split myself into two.

Hands here.

Eyes there.

Mind unravelling into halves that never met.

Behind me, the theatre continued.

Noise.

Cramps.

Fever.

Priority.

Grotesque.

Absurd.

Relentless.

And through it all,

she held the line.

My resident,

shouldering the ordinary,

so I could shoulder the extraordinary.

The Weight

When the storm loosened,

I turned back.

To the woman still waiting.

Wrist bent, eyes tired, silent intact.

We set her bone.

Plaster bound her pain.

She thanked me,

not for speed,

not for priority,

but for remembering her at all.

Her gratitude pierced deeper than any complaint.

The man with the bleed was wheeled to neurosurgery.

The old man left for ICU,

breathing easier,

but only slightly.

The noise dissolved.

Only wrappers littered the floor.

Only chairs out of place

bore witness to what had passed.

And I stood

with the truth.

The ER did not survive because of me.

It survived because of her.

Because sometimes survival

is not heroism, but division.

Delegation.

Trust.

The world will not know her name.

Her face will not be remembered.

But tonight,

the temple stood

because she chose to guard its doors.

If this made you pause, forward it to someone who might need it.

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More soon.

Another moment.

Another reminder that we are still, somehow, human in all of this.

Yours,

Dr. Adarsh Nath,

Letters from the ER

Disclaimer:

Patient details have been changed to protect confidentiality. This is a personal reflection, not medical advice or substitute for professional care.