NON FICTION

Inside The Heart Of A Hospital

Where grief lives there is love, loss, and resilience

Damane Zehra
Human Parts
Published in
5 min readSep 26, 2024

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Corridor on the way to linen room — Image by author

“The truth is… airports have seen more sincere kisses than wedding halls, and the walls of hospitals have heard more prayers than the walls of churches.”-Unknown

It’s 1 a.m. I am on call duty, which starts at 8:30 yesterday morning and ends at noon tomorrow. I finished entering the labs and doing my final tasks at approximately 12:30 a.m. Then I ordered some food because I was famished. The call was so hectic that I couldn’t think of eating the whole day. The food would be arriving in approximately one hour.

When I walked into the on-call doctor’s room after the whole day, I couldn’t find any bedsheets or pillow covers. At this time of night, we usually go to the linen room to get these things. This is my favorite task at the end of the day; every night on call, I just make a very nice bed, change all the sheets, replace all the pillow covers, and empty all the dustbins.

I don’t know whether I would be able to sleep or not, but I just do it out of habit, and seeing that bed gives me a lot of satisfaction. When I was on my way to the linen room, the corridors were all deserted. There was a lot of silence in the hospital, and I like that time a lot, the nighttime when most of the…

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Damane Zehra
Damane Zehra

Written by Damane Zehra

A cancer doctor from Pakistan. I write about my own experiences and perspectives.

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