It was 5.16AM when my phone vibrated;too early for any good news. A message from my staff flashed across the screen: “Dr, I can’t make it today. My sister got admitted.”
I stared at it for a moment, half-asleep, half-stressed, and yet fully aware of what that meant for the next 16 hours. She was the one covering the whole day. My fingers typed only one word: “Okay.”
Maybe I should have said more, maybe I should have asked how her sister was doing, but my brain froze. When you run a clinic like this,short staffed and overstretched,empathy sometimes hides behind exhaustion.
By 5.45AM, I was already on the road. The streetlights were still glowing, the sky still holding on to the last shade of night. I reached the clinic around 6.20AM. We only open at 8AM, but this has been my routine for the past three months.Arriving before dawn just to escape the jam, parking under the same building, waiting inside the car with the engine humming like a tired heartbeat.
Every morning feels like a quiet negotiation with myself: How long more can I keep doing this? How long before something inside me gives up?
As the minutes pass, the silence of the early morning pulls me back into my memories,back to my college days in Bangladesh.
There was a time, years ago, when life felt heavy but much simpler. I remember walking through the campus streets in Bangladesh with my backpack slung over one shoulder. The corridors carried the lingering smell of chewed paan that patients spat on the floor, and yet I held on to that stubborn belief that the future would be bright no matter how tough the present was.
Bangladesh was chaotic.
Bangladesh was loud.
Bangladesh was dirty.
But my heart… my heart was lighter then.
I remember walking through the hospital corridors where patients slept on the floor because there were no beds. Men recovering from surgeries lying on torn blankets. Women sitting with their babies on cold tiles.
The OT itself was nothing like what we romanticised during first year. It was cramped, ventilation was questionable, and sometimes you had to scrub in while stepping over puddles from a leaking ceiling. The instruments weren’t shiny; the air wasn’t sterile. The power would cut halfway during a procedure, and the generator would kick in with a roar that made everyone laugh instead of panic.
But in that chaos, life felt meaningful.
We used to take case histories from patients lying in corridors, not beds. We sat beside them, cross-legged on the floor, and they told us their stories with gratitude in their eyes.Gratitude for us, the students who could do nothing but listen. That kind of appreciation… you don’t see it often anymore.
Even the mortuary had its own strange poetry. Bodies kept at room temperature, fat saponification creating a smell so strong you’d lose your appetite for days. But we still stood there, masks too thin, stomachs too sensitive, hearts too innocent,believing that this was the price for a brighter future.
Back then, everything looked colourful from the outside.
We believed once we graduated, once we wore the white coat, the world would change.
We would change.
But the dream blurred when I entered KKM.
I thought it would be structured, respectful, professional. Instead, it was political, exhausting, and often cruel. Some days I felt more like a machine than a doctor. Nothing prepared me for the toxicity, the pressure, the way your spirit slowly gets eaten away behind fluorescent lights and endless queues.
Cases never ended, shifts never ended, expectations never ended. You were either burnt out or burning out slowly. Somewhere in those long nights and chaotic days, the version of me who once believed everything would be colourful slowly faded.
Now I’m in private practice, and yes,life is different. The rules are different, the responsibilities heavier, and the pressure more personal. Here, everything falls on you. Staff issues, patient complaints, monthly sales, endless decisions that affect people’s lives and your own sanity. No one prepares you for this side of medicine.
But the struggle?
It still follows me like a shadow.
These early mornings in the car, these silent hours where I question my own limits, these unexpected messages at 5AM..They all remind me that adulthood is nothing like what we imagined in medical college.
Yet, somewhere inside, that same stubborn student from Bangladesh still whispers, Hold on. Something better is coming.
Because maybe that’s what keeps us going.Not the reality we face every day, but the tiny hope that tomorrow might be different. And maybe, one day, this routine, this stress, this loneliness in the car before sunrise… will become just another story I survived.
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