Being a junior resident (JR01) at our medical college, one of the busiest institutions in North India, is like walking a tightrope. Commission is constantly chosen over convenience. Among all the scut work a JR01 is expected to do, the worst is arranging drugs and supplies unavailable in government stock. In obstetrics, any drug could be demanded at any second without warning. The inability to produce the required drug immediately could result in a patient’s death—or sometimes even the resident’s.

Consequently, all the JR01s had a bag stuffed with anything and everything. This bag was the backbone of a JR01’s existence, their most prized possession. In the early morning hours when we marched into the hospital carrying our huge bags, we looked like a row of ants carrying crumbs of food much bigger than themselves. Every JR01 had metamorphosed into a walking, talking dispensary.

I remember one friend’s mother discovering a pack of condoms in her bag. Poor thing had to spend an entire evening explaining that the condoms were meant exclusively for transvaginal sonography. Her mother was finally convinced only when she realized that when one doesn’t have time to eat, bathe, or sleep, one certainly cannot afford time to fornicate. The bags were passed down the generations as priceless legacies when new batches of juniors arrived.

There was no right way of procuring these drugs. Beg, borrow, or steal—the drug had to be there when needed. Months of collecting had ensured that most drugs were in our bags except one drug that became every JR01’S worst nightmare.

Fentanyl was neither available in government supply nor in the market. Being a habit-forming drug, it wasn’t accessible to patients despite our well-written prescriptions. Anesthetists—well known for making life difficult for gynae JR01s—would just not give spinal anesthesia without Fentanyl (Fenta).

Very soon, Fentanyl was not merely a drug, it had become an emotion.

A JR01’s level of competence was measured by her ability to produce Fenta. Competence was inversely proportional to the time taken to fetch the drug.

A friend’s loyalty was assessed by her willingness to share her vial of Fenta in the hour of need.

If a person of the opposite gender offered you a vial of Fenta as a token of help, you could be sure they had some romantic interests at heart.

More fights had broken out over the custody of this exquisite drug than over any oil well across the world.

Once it was even utilized in solving a crime. A JR01’s precious bag of drugs was robbed in the hospital campus and a number of items went missing. After much speculation, it was concluded that no JR01 could be blamed for the robbery since a vial of Fenta was left untouched. A JR01 could not commit a crime so low and not be tempted to steal Fenta. Hence the incident was declared the work of some patient or domestic help.

Those were the days when a shiver ran down the JR01’s spine the moment people asked for Fenta in the operation theater. Whatever drug we had was used under careful supervision, like the last bottle of water in a drought. When that came to an end, all that was left was waiting for patients’ attendants to return empty-handed from medical stores while everyone in the OT waited anxiously for the JR01 to show up with the drug so surgery could start. The JR01 scurried in all directions like a frightened rat looking for a way out. The pressure was immense.

This reign of terror continued for a few months until one day a divine phone number appeared. All we had to do was dial it, ask for Fenta, and a God-sent angel would deliver it to the hospital gates.

It was only later that we discovered the “angel” was in fact an illegal drug dealer. Or a drug lord. I’m still not sure. None of us had ever seen him.

I always thought our angel was a pharmacist considerate enough to deliver drugs to our doorstep. I imagined a decent, well-groomed, tie-wearing man, hair combed down with water, clad in a well-ironed formal shirt as I exclaimed to my friends, “What a nice pharmacist we have found. Our days of the Fentanyl fiasco are finally over!” The other JR01s would invariably nod in agreement. Oblivious to the truth, for a while life had become a little less painful for us.

One fateful morning, Sakshi was preparing her patients for elective surgery. There were eleven of them, all dressed in white OT apparel. Once clad in the clean OT dress, patients are supposed to remain in the pre-operative ward. However Sakshi’s eleven pre-op patients were heading towards the gate in a single file. With Fenta unavailable in the government stock or the market, they were marching – still dressed in sterile OT whites – to buy the medicine from the angel at the hospital gate, the only way to ensure their surgeries could proceed. 

What a nice guy, working so early for our convenience. So sincere!

Hardly had the march of the patients reached the gates when it was spotted by Dr. S, our resident in-charge. She was blessed with the ability to magically appear whenever and wherever something unlawful was being carried out by the residents. Almost like she had an inbuilt radar for detecting the ruckus created by her residents. There were only a couple of incidents that had gone past her unnoticed in about a decade. Needless to say, those incidents had gone down in history.

She was also the fastest and strongest link between the residents and the management. For minor breaches in protocol, she’d take our class herself and act as our shock absorber when the matter reached the HOD. But for something as huge as trafficking Fentanyl illegally into the department, she was going to ensure everyone involved was served the punishment they deserved.

So having spotted the march, she quietly followed the trail of pre-op patients right up to the hospital gates where the drug deal of the millennium was underway.

The angel was standing at the entrance. He was in his mid-twenties. His orange ombré-colored hair gelled into perfect spikes, like a vigilant porcupine. He wore a tight black T-shirt with short sleeves, his arms covered in neo-traditional tattoos from the wrist to the shoulder. It was abundantly clear he was anything but a pharmacist- more of a low-waist-ripped-jeans-wearing goon.

What followed this raid was intense. An active inquiry was immediately set up, and our degrees—which we had not yet obtained—hung in the balance. Sakshi had dug a grave for herself and dragged us all in with her.

Unaware of the sequence of events that had taken place in the elective OT downstairs, I was busy shifting my patient in the emergency OT on the first floor when Dr. S showed up.

She looked as calm and composed as ever. “Where do you people arrange Fentanyl from?” That question was aimed at me, in an attempt to gather more information about the angel. Overwhelmed by my desire to impress Dr. S, I perceived it as an opportunity to make a great impression on her. I deemed that if I told her I’d cracked a way of arranging Fentanyl from a “pharmacist,” I’d be declared a resident prodigy. I could almost see myself emerging from a blazing light with a vial of Fentanyl in my hands when it was most needed, while people all around me cheered in unison.

“Ma’am, there’s this pharmacist. We just have to ring him up and he delivers the drug,” I told her excitedly. I watched her closely, trying to find in her eyes the appreciation I deserved.

“Fine. Call him then and show me how you do it.” 

Still ignorant of what was happening, I gladly took out my phone and gave the angel a ring. What could be more illustrative than a live demonstration itself!

“Will you put it on speaker mode?” she requested—but it wasn’t really a request, was it?

“Hello, can you please deliver a vial of Fentanyl to our Obstetrics dept?”

“I am never coming to that department again!” he yelled frantically. “I was caught by this madam. She asked me all sorts of questions. Please don’t call me again!”

I stood there mortified. Slowly, I raised my eyes to meet Dr S’s gaze. An expression of disapproval diluted with triumph was apparent on her face. This was the first time in months it had become perfectly clear to me that the angel had been nothing but a mistake.

Dr. S had always preferred sarcasm over screaming. So I stood there with my head hanging low while insults wrapped in clever puns were thrown at me at supersonic speeds. What came next was a fifteen-minute session where responsibility and awareness were taught to me so well, it’s possible some of my genes mutated permanently. 

A meeting was set up for the coming morning to find the main culprit and come up with a feasible solution. All the JR01s sat in front. Our seniors sat behind like uncomfortable parents at a parent-teacher meeting for failing students.

The feeling of anxiety and apprehension mixed with the anticipated loss of a fellow JR01 was surreal. On being asked who provided us with the dealer’s phone number, all the JR01s sheepishly blamed the next one till a full circle of blames was complete. A closed loop had formed, and without a reliable timeline, it was impossible to crack.

All of a sudden, we heard a voice, hesitant at first but growing more convincing by the minute. “The number was given to us by the anesthesia team. They were the ones who told us it was safe to order Fentanyl from him.” Pallavi, the smartest of us all, was frequently responsible for saving our skin.

Then I witnessed a strange phenomenon—a community-based telepathy at work, reviving all JR01s from a near persistent vegetative state to a state of vocal unison. I heard the following words come out of my mouth: “Yes, it was the anesthesia team.” And so did the others. Thus, the blame game came to an end with the full circle of blames being tangentially diverted to the team of anesthetists.

Fortunately, the management was finally successful in arranging for unlimited supply of Fentanyl. The amount of Fenta we now had at our disposal was Fentabulous (pardon me for the poor pun—couldn’t resist it). And that is how our era of agony, our Fenta festival, ended.

A few weeks later, Metrogyl was out of supply. The Metrogyl madness continued for a couple of months, but then it was taken care of.

And then Sensorcaine became unavailable. The Sensorcaine saga lasted for a few months, then it was taken care of too.

And so on and so forth. Life continued, and so did our residency.