The first weeks
The internship began the way everyone said it would: paperwork, a white coat that still creases at the elbows, and a duty roster that reads like a puzzle. The hospital took longer to learn than the roster. A government hospital is its own small city. There are corridors that fill by nine, queues that fold back on themselves, and an unwritten map of which stairwell is the fast way to the wards and when the canteen is worth the walk.
No one tells you how quickly the strangeness wears off. By the second week the rhythm was familiar: rounds in the morning, an OPD line that never quite ends, slow afternoons that vanish the moment something urgent comes in. The work is unglamorous in the way that matters. For much of this district, this building is where medicine happens, and being a small part of that machinery is its own education.
I'm keeping these notes for myself as much as for anyone else, a record of what this year looks like from the inside, before any of it starts to feel ordinary.