Process to kill the Patient’s

Some mornings start with coffee and end with regret. This one started with coffee, ended with regret, and had six hours of corporate hospital chaos sandwiched in between.

My mother’s been having some liver trouble, and we decided it was time to stop trusting Google and go see an actual big doctor — the kind with a name plate the size of a menu card and a reputation to match. So we picked a corporate hospital. You know the type. Glass doors that slide open like they’re auditioning for an airport. Marble floors so shiny you can check your hairline in them. A lobby that smells like eucalyptus and money. I walked in already bracing myself — “this is going to be expensive, but at least it’ll be fast.” Reader, I was half right.

The Illusion of Speed

We’d been smart. Booked an appointment in advance through the helpdesk, patted ourselves on the back for being organized adults. Mom sat in the waiting area — I told her to relax, I’d handle the running around. Famous last words.

“First floor, Cluster A,” the helpdesk said, like it was giving me GPS directions to happiness.

I went. Cluster A looked at me like I’d wandered in from the wrong movie. “Oh, that doctor’s team isn’t here. Go to Tower 2, Cluster G.”

I want you to picture this. Tower 2. As in, there’s more than one tower. As in, this hospital has its own zip code. I walked what felt like a thousand steps — I didn’t check my phone’s step counter, but I’m fairly sure I unlocked a fitness badge — just to register an OP visit. Just to say “hi, we exist, please see us eventually.”

Then came the real plot twist: before meeting the big doctor, you don’t actually meet the big doctor. You meet his team. A whole squad of junior doctors whose job is to interview you, take your history, collect your old reports, order fresh tests, and basically pre-chew the case before serving it to the main man. It’s like trying to meet a celebrity and getting handed off to four assistants first. Finally, someone tells you “okay, now the big doctor will see you.” Cost of this privilege: ₹600 OP fee. Fine. Reasonable. I can respect a system, even a slow one, if it’s at least honest about being slow.

It was not honest about being slow.

The Wait That Ate the Morning

We arrived at 9 AM. By 10, we were still sitting. By 11, I had achieved a new personal record for how many times a human can refresh a phone screen with nothing new on it.

Somewhere around then I remembered I’m a functioning human with earphones and decided to put on some music, only to realize I’d left my charger at home. So there I was, rationing my own phone battery like it was the last bit of oxygen on a spacewalk — no music, minimal scrolling, just me and my thoughts and the ceiling tiles. My girlfriend, who genuinely loves my mom like her own, kept waiting for updates — “any news? how’s aunty? did the doctor see you yet?” — and I had to keep typing back one-liners because I couldn’t afford to burn battery on a call, let alone a song. You’d think a hospital would at least have a charging point at every third chair. Apparently that’s asking for too much.

No music, no nap, no peace — just sit, wait, sit, wait, and occasionally hand mom a protein bar like I was running a very sad, very small ration camp.

Behind us, a couple of young IT employees were having what I can only describe as the most intense conversation I’ve overheard in my life. “Bro my cholesterol is 3.5.” “Mine’s 4.9.” And then a full ten-minute debate on whose number was worse, like two people arguing over cricket stats. I wanted to turn around and say “gentlemen, we’re all in the same waiting room, your cholesterol isn’t winning you anything here” — but honestly, it was the funniest, most human thing I’d witnessed all morning, and I needed the laugh.

Bored, restless, and mildly delirious, I asked a receptionist the question every waiting-room warrior eventually asks: “Bro, how much longer?”

“Well,” she said, with the calm of someone who’s delivered this line a thousand times, “we do have a Platinum option. ₹2000 OP fee instead of ₹600, and your wait drops from 3 hours to 2.”

I blinked. “So… same doctor?”

“Yes.”

“Same treatment? Same medicines?”

“Yes.”

“Then what am I actually buying for the extra fourteen hundred rupees?”

“Time. It’s for premium patients. Normal patients’ final bill comes to around ₹10,000. Premium comes to ₹25,000.”

I did not take the Platinum package. Partly because ₹15,000 extra just to save one hour felt like paying a toll to skip one traffic signal on a road that’s jammed for the next fifty kilometers anyway. And partly because I was too busy having an internal monologue about wallets that apparently need to be lightened just to prove they were heavy in the first place. I walked away, quietly proud of my restraint, and went back to my chair to continue my true calling: professional waiting.

Three and a Half Hours Later…

We were finally called in. “Finally” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because “called in” did not mean “seen.” There were already four people ahead of us inside. We waited another thirty minutes standing in a hallway that had somehow become a queue within a queue — a waiting room inside the waiting room, like Russian nesting dolls, except each doll is angrier than the last.

We finally got inside the actual consultation room, and the doctor looked at us, said “I’ll be right back,” and left. We sat there — me, mom, and the doctor’s empty chair — for twenty more minutes, staring at diplomas on the wall and wondering if we’d accidentally wandered into a very expensive waiting simulator.

When he did come back, he checked the reports and said, gently, “We need one small test.”

Small. That word would come back to haunt me.

The Test That Took a Village

“Small test” turned into: walk to pay the bill (₹4,000, casually), walk to Cluster H, discover the duty doctor’s gone for lunch, get told mom needs to be fasting for this test — information nobody mentioned before — and then get redirected to Cluster N.

Cluster N had fifteen people ahead of us. Fifteen. I made mom sit while I stood in line like a soldier holding a position, for forty-five minutes, watching the line move at the speed of continental drift. By the time it was our turn, I had no energy left, but mom had even less, so I pushed us both forward and asked, as politely as a completely depleted human can, if we could please just get this done.

A nurse finally did the test. We walked back to Cluster A, hoping for closure. Instead: “Doctor will be available again at 7:30 PM.”

We went home. We did not walk into the house — we collapsed into it, two bodies dropping onto the bed like we’d just finished a war, not a hospital visit.

Round Two: The Evening Circus

We dragged ourselves back that evening, because that’s what you do — you show up again, because the alternative is not showing up, and that’s not an option when it’s your mother. Forty people were already waiting. Forty. The doctor didn’t walk in until 9 PM.

At that point I genuinely started wondering — is this man treating sick people, or is this some elaborate government-approved population-control experiment disguised as a hospital? I’m only half joking. When you’ve spent twelve hours orbiting the same building, dark thoughts start to feel like reasonable thoughts.

He finally saw us, prescribed a few medicines, and sent us home. Twelve hours. One consultation. One test. Two exhausted humans and a fistful of prescriptions.

The Ones Who Suffer in Silence

Here’s the part that stopped being funny for me. Looking around that waiting room, not everyone was there for a mildly inconvenient afternoon like ours. Some people had clearly traveled from far away — no contacts in the city, no one to run between clusters for them, just sitting there hour after hour, hoping the one doctor with the “right experience” would eventually call their name. And because that doctor is good, because he’s in demand, patients just absorb whatever wait, whatever chaos, whatever disrespect the system hands them, because the alternative is going back home with no answers at all.

That’s not okay. People come to a hospital because they’re already struggling — they need to be monitored, cared for, treated with some urgency and dignity, not shuffled between towers like paperwork. And the worst part is nobody complains out loud. Not really. Because who’s going to risk getting on the wrong side of a corporate hospital when your mother’s treatment depends on staying in their good books? So everyone just swallows it. Sits. Waits. Says thank you on the way out. This needs to change, and it probably won’t, until enough people say so.

The Walk Home

Walking back that night, something clicked for me — the kind of thought that only arrives after you’ve been sufficiently worn down by a system. All the food this generation eats is manufactured to be addictive and unhealthy. It’s advertised beautifully, packaged irresistibly, and people — myself included, let’s be honest — keep eating it. Then we get sick. Then we come here. Then hospitals do business. If everyone ate clean and moved their bodies, half these waiting rooms would be empty, and half these “platinum” packages would cease to exist. It’s a cycle, and I finally understood the whole machine, standing there at 9:30 PM with an empty stomach and a full prescription bag.

So here’s my actual advice, dear reader, minus the sarcasm for one paragraph: eat well, move your body, sleep on time. Not because some blog told you to, but because I just spent a full day watching what happens on the other side of that decision, and it’s not something I’d wish on anyone — least of all someone I love.

But Here’s the Real Story

Underneath all the sarcasm about clusters and towers and platinum packages, there’s a much simpler truth I keep coming back to. My mother carried me for nine months and went through pain I can’t even imagine to bring me into this world. Standing in a line for a few hours, walking a few extra towers, skipping lunch, coming back twice in one day — none of that even comes close to balancing that scale. It’s not supposed to. That’s not how this works.

Every son and daughter should feel that weight, even when it’s inconvenient, even when it’s a Tuesday and you had other plans, even when the hospital system makes you question humanity itself. Because one day, the roles reverse completely, and the people who carried us start needing to be carried — and showing up, again and again, tired or not, frustrated or not, is the least we owe them.

We came home that night with a bag of medicines and a story I’ll probably tell for years. Mom’s doing better now. And honestly? I’d walk those nine thousand steps in total, sarcasm fully intact, if it meant she got the care she needed.

Just maybe next time, I’m packing snacks, a power bank, and lower expectations. In that order.