The Broken Doctor

The shrill sound of the alarm at 4:30 am, jarred Peter awake, he fumbled around his bed looking for his phone so that he could snooze the alarm and continue with his sleep, but the phone was so buried among his bed sheets that by the time he found it, he could no longer bring himself to sleep.

He got up from the bed went into the bathroom to wash his face, he came back into his bedroom and said his morning prayers, then went about preparing himself for his first day at work, for as long as he can remember Monday mornings has always seemed slow to him, and today was not an exception, after taking his bath and dressing up he took his laptop and went online and checked up the website of St. joseph hospital.

He wanted to know a few more things about the hospital before he started work there. The previous Friday he was given a tour around the hospital, which was large and impressive, but his guide has failed to fully answer some of his questions.

On the other hand he was surprised that he got the job at St. Joseph Hospital, not that he was not qualified for it, he graduated from his medical School with a good result, second in his class, but this was a kind of job that was normally reserved for children of big men and giants in the country, he still could not believe that he got the job without paying anyone to negotiate for him.

After thirty minutes on the hospital’s website, he had gathered all the information he needed to take off. He grabbed a quick meal and left his apartment at 5:57am.

St. Joseph General Hospital was large and imposing, it has only been functioning for seven months but it was already the number one hospital in the State, even people from other states visited it to get professional medical care.

Peter arrived at the hospital several minutes before his work time. He signed in at the register and was directed to Doctor Robert’s office by the receptionist. Doctor Robert was the chief surgeon at St. Joseph’s.

After the introduction, they began their rounds of surgery which began with a C-section of a twenty three year old woman and ended with an appendix operation, things went on smoothly and by the end of the day, peter had learnt a lot of new things about surgery, because Doctor Roberts was very interactive throughout the surgeries.

Peter hoped that every other day will be like that day, the main reason Peter studied medicine was that growing up he lost a lot of friends and families to different illness and diseases, so preservation of human life was very important to him, his shift ended at 5:00pm and he headed home.

He resumed work the following day at the emergency ward and was faced with gruesome accidents and conditions, and after weeks of working there he came to the realisation that he could not save everybody, things came to a head when a six year old was wheeled into the emergency ward, she has been involved in a motor accident and she was disfigured by the accident, her shrill screams could be heard all over the hospital, despite the efforts of the doctors she died later in the day from blood loss.

When he heard of her death, he cried profusely, and when he got home that night it slowly dawned on him that he cannot save everybody.