The surgical seminar room smelled of cheap coffee and raw panic.
Sandhya adjusted her white coat, trying to mask the tremor in her hands. She had been on her feet for thirty-six consecutive hours. Her eyes burned, her lower back was a knot of pure agony, and her brain felt fried from a back-to-back rotation of trauma admissions, emergency appendectomies, and endless ward rounds.
Yet, here she was, standing before the five fresh, terrified faces of the new first-year residents. Exactly twelve months ago, she had been sitting in those exact chairs. Only, back then, there had been four of them.
"Welcome to General Surgery," Sandhya said, forcing her voice to remain steady despite the exhaustion clawing at her throat. "Before we hand out your shift schedules, let me give you a reality check. Look at the chairs you are sitting in. Last year, four of us started. Within the first two months, two of our co-residents packed their bags, quit the program, and walked out."
A collective gasp rippled through the new batch.
"Ma'am?" a nervous junior resident in the front row asked. "Was the schedule too brutal?"
"The profession is brutal," Sandhya corrected firmly, her gaze hardening. "You have entered one of the best hospitals in this city. People come here with a mountain of hope, as a last resort. In surgery, there is absolutely zero room for human error. The patient load is crushing. Our co-residents didn't leave because of a bad schedule—they left because they realized this field demands a level of strength they weren't ready for. Only myself and Dr. Rishabh stayed to carry the weight."
Right on cue, the heavy double doors of the seminar room swung open.
The room went dead silent. Dr. Rohan stepped in, looking infuriatingly crisp and alert. He didn't acknowledge the new freshers. His sharp, unforgiving eyes locked directly onto Sandhya, taking in her pale face and dark under-eye circles with total indifference.
"Dr. Sandhya," Rohan’s voice clipped through the air. "Since you have enough energy to lecture the freshers, you can take over the incoming trauma cases from the ER. Dr. Rishabh is needed in OR 3."
A white-hot wave of anger surged through Sandhya’s veins. Trauma cases? Now?
"Sir," Sandhya said, her voice dropping, a dangerous edge of defiance leaking through her exhaustion. "I have been on duty for thirty-six hours straight. I’ve covered the night shifts back-to-back. Protocol states—"
"Protocol doesn't save a ruptured spleen, Doctor," Rohan interrupted, his voice dropping to a freezing, razor-sharp whisper that cut her off entirely. "If a thirty-six-hour shift is enough to compromise your competence, perhaps you belong in a less demanding department. Do the trauma intake. Now."
Sandhya gripped the edge of the podium, her knuckles turning white. The fury inside her was roaring, a chaotic mix of indignation and helplessness. She had no options. If she argued further, he would question her capability as a surgeon; if she walked out, her career was over. She had to swallow the bitter pill.
"Yes, Chief," she forced out through a tight jaw, her posture stiffening.
Rohan turned on his heel and vanished down the corridor without a backward glance.
The moment the doors clicked shut, the seminar room erupted into frantic, hushed whispers. The new residents looked at Sandhya with a mix of awe and absolute horror. They understood that surgery was tough—but the targeted, unyielding harshness Dr. Rohan had just unleashed on her felt entirely personal
Sandhya pushed through the swinging doors of the ER triage, the chaotic symphony of beeping monitors, rushing nurses, and groaning patients washing over her.
Near the trauma bay, Dr. Rishabh was leaning against a counter, rubbing his bloodshot eyes. He looked ready to collapse; he had been on a brutal 24-hour call, dragged from one emergency surgery to the next. He was desperately scribbling on a patient chart, looking around like a man drowning and praying for a life jacket.
"Hand it over," Sandhya said, stepping up next to him and reaching for the chart.
Rishabh snapped his head up, his eyes widening in pure surprise. "Sandhya? What the hell are you doing here? Didn't the Chief give you any of the new junior residents to handle the intake?" He groaned, leaning back against the desk. "Oh man... that man is going to turn us into literal zombies. You've been on your feet for thirty-six hours!"
"The freshers are in orientation," Sandhya replied, her face a mask of professional, emotionless calm as she took the chart from his hand. "Go. Take a break. Go rest for a bit."
Rishabh hesitated, looking at her pale face. "Sandhya, you can't double down after a thirty-six-hour shift. I can stretch for another hour—"
"Rishabh, stop," she interrupted, a small, tired smile finally breaking through her stiff demeanor. "Today is the orientation day. It's the only day this week you'll actually get off on time to meet her."
Rishabh winced slightly. He had been trying to balance residency with a long-term relationship, and his fiancée had been waiting for days just to catch a glimpse of him.
"Go to her," Sandhya insisted softly, giving him a gentle shove toward the locker room. When Rishabh still looked guilty, she let out a dry, self-deprecating laugh. "Look at me. My love life is a graveyard, and my marriage prospects are nonexistent. I don't have anyone waiting at home to get mad at me, so what's the point of me taking a break? Go spend time with your girl before she forgets what you look like."
Rishabh opened his mouth to reply, a grateful but worried look in his eyes—
"The patient with the ruptured spleen is arriving in four minutes."
The cold, sharp voice cut through the ER noise like a siren.
Both residents snapped to attention. Dr. Rohan stood at the entrance of the trauma bay, his arms crossed, looking at them with unyielding scrutiny. His eyes lingered on Sandhya, entirely indifferent to the fact that she had just admitted to working past her physical limits.
"I expect a complete preoperative checkup done the second the gurney hits the floor," Rohan ordered, his gaze shifting to Sandhya. "I want a full lab panel, cross-matching for four units of blood, and a stable blood pressure before we wheel him up to the OR. If the patient goes into hemorrhagic shock because your reflexes are delayed, Doctor, it’s on you. Do I make myself clear?"
Sandhya swallowed the bitter taste of exhaustion and anger, forcing her posture to straighten. "Perfectly clear, Chief. Pre-op status will be ready."
Rohan gave a solitary, tight nod, his face unreadable, before turning back toward the surgical elevator
Sandhya’s heart hammered against her ribs. She knew why Rohan looked at her like he wanted to rip her apart. She knew that if it weren’t for the professional ethics binding him, he would have cast her out of this hospital on day one. Her very name was a daily salt in his unhealed wound.
She reached across the trauma gurney to attach the monitor to the incoming patient. Her fingers, trembling from 36 hours of continuous labor, slipped.
The pulse oximeter dropped, clattering loudly against the steel frame of the bed before hitting the linoleum floor.
The sound was like a gunshot in the tense room.
A sudden, terrifying wave of anger transformed Dr. Rohan’s face. It was the moment he had been waiting for—a microscopic crack in her competence that gave him the excuse to unleash the storm brewing inside him.
"Are you losing your coordination, Doctor?!" Rohan roared, his voice booming over the sound of the ER monitors, causing several nurses to freeze in their tracks. "A simple oximeter probe? If you can't even handle a basic piece of plastic, how do you expect me to trust you with a scalpel inside a bleeding abdomen? Your incompetence is a liability to this department!"
The five new junior residents stood clustered near the bay doors, their eyes wide with shock. A heavy, pathetic silence settled over the room. Sandhya could feel their eyes burning into her back. She could practically hear their thoughts fracturing into a dozen different assumptions:
Some looked at her with deep sympathy; others looked down on her, assuming she was genuinely incompetent; a few simply stared in horror at the unhinged cruelty of their HOD.
Sandhya’s face burned. The humiliation was a physical weight, but the injustice of it sparked a dying ember of defiance in her chest. She looked up, her voice trembling but clear. "Sir... the juniors are watching. Why are you shouting at me like this over a dropped probe?"
Rohan stepped into her space, his eyes flashing with a dangerous, icy fire. He didn't care about the audience. He didn't care about decorum.
"Let me remind you exactly who I am in this hospital, Dr. Sandhya," he whispered, his voice dangerously low, dripping with venom. "I am the Head of this Department. I don't care who is watching. If I say you are failing, you are failing. Do your job, or get out of my O.R."
Sandhya swallowed hard, gulping down the white-hot lump of anger and tears threatening to choke her. She closed her eyes for a single second. When she opened them, the emotion was gone. Dead. She forced her expression into a completely blank, robotic mask.
"Yes, Chief," she said, her voice devoid of life. She picked up the probe and went straight back to the pre-op checkup, completely tuning out the world around her.
A few meters away, Rohan tore himself away from the gurney and stormed over to the anesthesia desk, aggressively discussing a pre-op opinion. The patient's blood pressure was dangerously spiking despite the antihypertensives, and his focus shifted entirely to the medical crisis.
Sandhya kept her head down, blindly adjusting the IV lines, her mind numb.
"Excuse me? Dr. Sandhya?"
A soft, authoritative voice broke through her trance. Sandhya turned around. Standing there in crisp, elegant scrubs was Dr. Sandhya—the HOD of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The ex-fiancée. The woman who owned the name that was currently ruining Sandhya's life.
The older doctor looked toward the anesthesia desk where Rohan was fiercely arguing with the intensivist, then looked back at the exhausted resident with a gentle, somewhat sad expression.
"Did Rohan have his lunch today?" the OBGYN HOD asked softly
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