Encounters with Rules and Loss:- -| Hospital Tales | I

Limited life - A thousand stories

Hospitals are places where life's rawest emotions play out—from the frustrations to the profound depths of grief. Here are two glimpses into the human experience within these walls.

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The Nose Ring

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“Hello Sir, Mr. Sen? Can you come to the ICU? We need to discuss something, the nose ring your wife was wearing. We need your permission to remove it.”

The coordinator’s voice was practiced, professional and gentle, like someone balancing truth on a needlepoint. On the other end, there was only the sound of breath. Not quite still, not quite steady.

Then a mid-nasally voice, low and barely came alive.

“Can you wait? My brother… he’s coming. He’ll help me with all this.”

"Okay, Sir, Take your time, bring him up in the ICU reception area, when he is here ? We need to process it soon ! ", The reluctant coordinator agreed.

They waited.

And in that wait in the kind of quiet panic, not of sudden alarms, but the slow-burning grief of a man unmoored. Would he return? Or had the tide of loss already carried him somewhere unreachable in the ocean of never ending grief ?

Inside the ICU, the monitors were silent. The soft lights of the overhead lights filled the absence she had left behind. Thirty-five years old. A known case, choledocholithiasis, ascites, anemia, gastric obstruction. The chart had grown heavier by the day, and yet... they had hoped. Until morning betrayed them with a cardiac arrest.

Her husband had been there. Close, but only by geography. When she slipped away, he remained just outside reach, outside in the hallway, outside the moment.

“I can’t see her,” he had said, pressing the wall for support as if it might hold more strength than he could summon himself. “I feel sick. I can’t…” His voice trailed off like the end of a prayer not meant to be heard.

Calls went unanswered. Numbers changed. Finally, reluctantly, he returned. But not to her. He hovered at the threshold, unable to take that final step from ‘husband’ to ‘widower.’

He met the coordinator, and was talking, in between the conversation, he held up his phone. A lifeline not to the past, but to what remained.

His lock screen showed two boys, both under ten. One grinning, cheeks smeared with what might’ve been mango, the other mid-laugh, frozen in happier air. His trembling thumb stroked the glass, as if touching the image might hold him together.

“I haven’t told them yet,” he said. “How do I?”

No one spoke. What could be said? There are no medical guidelines for this kind of rupture. The designated coordinator can become the grief counselor sometimes.

He ran a small shop a few hundred kilometres away from the hospital, a place that smelled of soap and cumin, of batteries and sun-warmed plastic. A place where routines survived on rhythm. He’d have to go back. Pull up the shutter. Count coins. Smile at neighbors who would ask after his wife before remembering not to. And at night, he would have to sit those boys down, try to find the words to explain why the world had grown quieter and unfamiliar.

She wouldn’t return. Not for the fights over homework. Not for the scoldings softened by love. Not to rub Vicks on their chests or to sing old lullabies until they sleep.

And yet, her absence had to be named. Introduced like a new relative they never wished to meet.

I have seen countless deaths in my years here. But some leave a shadow that follows me home. They will eventually be forgotten to fill up new details. My wife tells me I should have grown used to it by now, calling it "immunity to one of life’s truths." But I haven’t grown a stone-cold heart. I pray I never will.

The nurse entered the hallway quietly. She held out a sealed envelope. Inside, the nose ring.

Small. Gold. Just a curve and a pin. Nothing elaborate.

But it had marked a life.

“She wore it every day,” the nurse said.

Mr. Sen took it with both hands, as if it might slip through his fingers and shatter. He didn't speak. But something in his face changed. Not softened, no, not yet. But it cracked. A single fracture in the mask of disbelief. He will hold a grudge against the institution or might not.

He held it, not like a relic, not like closure, but like an apology. To her. To their sons. And to the day that dared to continue without her.

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The Mission - Visiting Pass

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The late afternoon a tired golden sun , pooled across the hospital’s polished marble floors, casting long, skeletal shadows near the lift lobby. It was the hour when the air smelled faintly of disinfectant and sounds of footsteps moving and stopping, and when tempers, like the waiting-room magazines, grew a little frayed at the edges.

A group of four women stood near the elevators like a task force on a time-sensitive mission. Their leader, a beautiful woman in her late forties with a no-nonsense bun and the demeanor of someone who once talked her way into a fully booked train compartment, stepped forward. Her voice, sharp with urgency, snapped through the corridor: “Dada, I have a patient here. I need to go up, can you let me through?” She was about to lead the group into, the lift.

The security guard, whose uniform bore the veteran creases of long shifts and whose eyes held the weariness of someone who’d been mistaken for hospital administration more than once, replied evenly, “Ma’am, kindly step aside, visiting hours are over. And unless your patient can teleport you a pass, I can’t let you in.”

An awkward pause and sudden shock fell over the group. Eyebrows danced. Eyes darted. Not a single visitor passed by sight.

“But this is an emergency!” she snapped. “He needs me!”

“Ma’am, I understand, ” the guard said, offering the kind of smile only practiced diplomacy can conjure, “with all due respect, everyone in this building needs someone. That’s why it’s a hospital.”

Tension ricocheted in the air like static before a thunderstorm. Some of the accompanying women leaned in, ready to form a makeshift cheerleading squad, while others visibly reconsidered their choices in social alliances.

“Can we call the patient’s attendant?” the experienced guard asked, already half-dialing like a man who had developed reflexes from past drama.

The phone call connected.

“Hello. Yes, they’re here to see Mr. Arif… Uh-huh… Sorry, what? He’s not admitted here? "

He turned to the group with the patient calm of a man who had just watched a Shakespearean tragedy resolve itself in Act One.

“Ma’am,” he said, gently handing back the phone as if returning a sacred scroll, “your patient is in a different hospital. He might be in Sunrise Multispeciality. This is Zeus Hospital. Fifteen minutes that way from us. Since your patient isn't here, I have to ask you to stand back, and give way to the other attendees. If you still have any other patients, we would require a visiting pass. Sorry for the inconvenience caused. Can I suggest cab or auto ? We don't have the teleportation device here, to help ! .”

The woman blinked. Her pride performed a quiet retreat. “I… I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”

“No worries, Ma'am,” the guard said brightly. “Last week someone insisted their uncle was in Room 502. We haven’t had a 500-series since the west wing renovation.”

He leaned in slightly, lowering his voice to a stage-whisper: “Also, one poor guy brought two dozen samosas for a ward that doesn’t exist. Staff had to step in. Not all heroes wear capes, some wear hairnets.” and left a smile.

A soft laugh escaped one of the other women, who promptly stifled it with a pretend cough. The leader looked around, then nodded awkwardly, motioning for her group to retreat with grace and what little dignity remained.

As they shuffled off, the guard added, not unkindly, “A little kindness saves a lot of steps. It even makes elevators move faster, I swear it’s science.”

And like that, the storm passed. The corridor fell back into its usual rhythm of quiet urgency. The security guard straightened his cap and returned to his perch, ready for the next mistaken identity, misplaced patient, or misfired mission of mercy.

Somewhere down the hall, a nurse chuckled and shook her head while moving away. Somewhere else, the day exhaled and carried on.

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Mr. Tausif and the Great Tuesday Meltdown: Now with Extra Side Effects

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Most people ease into a Tuesday like—

Most people ease into a Tuesday like a tepid glass of water. Not Mr. Tausif. His Tuesday began with an existential crisis involving a blister pack and the realization that medication names are harder to remember than your aunt’s Wi-Fi password.

He stood in his bathroom, squinting, glasses on.

“Aripra...aripip...zoodle? Ziploc? Aripipra...wait, is it a pasta or a prescription? What is it ?”

His inner monologue became a Shakespearean monologue at a stage, where he frequently used to appear. “Oh, my noble pills ! Wouldst thou abandon thy host in this, his hour of cortisol?”

He stormed out, to get his fix, as he still believed that he is still a handful now.

Meanwhile, in a parallel pocket of medical bedlam, Nurse Shalini Thomas had just finished mediating a dispute between two patients arguing about whether the TV remote was "gaslighting them." She sipped her chai like it was a holy sacrament, mentally preparing for another round of What-Went-Wrong-and-Who-Yelled-First.

Shalini had a sixth sense for oncoming storms. Right on cue, she heard it: the slow crescendo of anxious mumbling echoing through the corridor. She put down her cup and whispered to no one in particular, “Tuesday’s got that look again.”

Mr. Tausif had arrived at the psychiatrist’s chamber, in the hospital only to find the doctor gone, the nurse missing, and a motivational poster that read “Sanity is a journey, not a destination” which felt personally targeted.

He had previously stormed out, forgetting two important things: the prescription and his phone charger. He isn't the one to realise it till he suffers from it.

Panicking, he called his wife:

“Farhin! The med’s gone, the doc’s disappeared like Anil kapur’s character in Mr. India, I’m ninety-nine percent sure I’m melting down, send help, batteries, and chocolate !

And then the phone died.

Back at the hospital, Shalini spotted him, pale, pacing, trying to unlock a wall panel with his hospital card.

“Sir,” she asked gently, “are you…trying to access the cafeteria through radiology?”

“I’m trying to remember my medication before my brain joins the Avengers. I think it's Aripragandolazepine-express.”

She didn't blink. She continued her walk towards Mr. Tausif. She’d once had a patient insist his inhaler was haunted.

Shalini nodded. “Let me call the doctor. Sit down. And please stop trying to fill out a form with your house key. He obliged and stopped tracing.

Dr. Mehra, already two hours deep into a PowerPoint titled "The Neuroscience of Emotional Pizza”answered on speakerphone.

“Yes, he’s mine. Again? It’s aripiprazole. Just write it down and distract him with Sudoku. Once he is alright, settled, inform his wife. ”

The ER was buzzing with activity. A man was claiming to be allergic to cotton. A child had shoved a toy train into his dad’s stethoscope. The overworked intern ( whose badge read “Dr. A. Kumar – maybe”) handed Shalini a paper and whispered, “I don't know where my shift ends. I've been awake since 2004.”

She marched Mr. Tausif to a corner bed and brewed emergency tea. The tension began to dissolve.

Until...

Farhin Anwar stormed in like an avenging angel in orthopedic sandals. Apron on, banana in hand, and hairnet askew. She held aloft a crumpled paper.

“You left this. On the fridge. Under the magnet shaped like my mother’s face ! ”

“Ah ! The prescription ! I remember now” he cried, as though spotting an oasis. He thought she had his mother's face magnet, but he didn't want to be ambushed by his wife.

“And this ! ” she said, flashing his daily meds tied inside a sock.

“I put them there so you’d remember to find them. Because Tuesday is a sock day. You missed sock day.”

Mr. Tausif whimpered.

“I did remember the first seven letters.”

“That’s like saying you remembered the plot of Hamlet but forgot everyone dies.”

As he sipped his tea, recovering some semblance of dignity, he offered sheepishly, “Maybe we tattoo the name on my arm...in Comic Sans.”

Shalini scribbled something in her journal. “Possible group activity: medical charades. Maybe no dinosaurs.”

In the background, the intern finally collapsed into a chair and whispered, “Has anyone seen my pager or sense of self?”

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A VISION

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The Emergency Room was in its usual storm of controlled chaos, monitors beeping, patients murmuring. The frantic rush when a new case rolled in is not one anyone wants to be in. But in between the frantic pace, Nurse Ray today carried a different kind of urgency.

He had a vision.

As he carefully administered an injection to the patient on the ER bed, he glanced over at the ER manager, Tausif, standing by the desk. With a straight face and absolute conviction, Ray declared, "I’m opening a hospital."

Tausif barely looked up from his reports. "Oh? That’s quite the plan." He began explaining the admission process for the patient to the attendant. He looked up and waved his hands to gesture Ray to wait.

Ray nodded, pushing up the sleeves of his scrub top. "You’ll be my HR manager."

Tausif finally met his gaze, eyebrows lifting in surprise before amusement crept into his expression. "HR? Just like that? You want people to hate me! Why?"

"You’re efficient," Ray said simply, adjusting the bandage on the patient’s arm. "ER runs smooth because of you. HR should too."

Tausif let out a chuckle, shaking his head. "I like that confidence of yours." He sends the attendant to the ER desk to do the rest.

Ray came to him, and nudged him, then paused, deep in thought before grinning. "I’ve got a name for the hospital."

Tausif leaned forward, curious. "Let’s hear it."

Ray whispered it, his voice barely audible above the chaos of the ER, but whatever it was sent Tausif into a fit of laughter. The nursing supervisor raised her brow, to get to know what was happening.

The ER Dr. Sharma overheard, pulling his mask down slightly. "Wait, what’s the name?"

Ray, still grinning, repeated it.

Now, the ER doctor was laughing too.

"Roles are set," Ray continued. "Cardio RMOs, Dr. Haque and Dr. Singh, will be directors."

Tausif folded his arms, shaking his head. "Does the Cardio team know this?"

Ray waved a hand dismissively. "They suggested the name themselves!"

At that, the whole group broke into laughter. The patient, still sitting upright, looked from one to the other, completely bewildered by the exchange.

The business of saving lives had momentarily morphed into the planning of a new one, leaving at least one patient utterly, and perhaps endearingly, confused. With a furrowed brow, she gathered her things and left, muttering under her breath, wondering what exactly she'd been part of.

Ray, still chuckling, patted Tausif’s shoulder. "Think about it, HR Manager. We’ve got plans to make."

Welcome To

Not Dead Yet General Hospital

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