# The Video

Source: https://upmed.net/burnout-room-2-the-video/  
Published: 2026-10-31 · Updated: 2026-10-31  
Category: Burnout Room  
Publisher: UPMED (https://upmed.net/)

> Burnout Room, Part 2. Thirty-eight seconds of video, one lakh views, and an apology Sana is told to sign.

*Burnout Room is a work of fiction drawn from the shared experiences of residents in Pakistan. Ravi General Hospital, its staff, patients and events are invented, and any resemblance to real persons, hospitals or incidents is coincidental. Real organisations appear only as public background. Some characters make choices that breach professional standards; the series portrays these to examine them, not to endorse them.*

Usman showed it to me in the corridor outside the ward, holding his phone sideways so I could see the whole screen. He was not smiling, which was how I knew it was bad.

The page had four lakh followers, a name with “Lahore” and “News” in it, and a profile picture of Minar-e-Pakistan at sunset. The caption said, *“Sarkari hospital mein doctor ka mareez ke saath rawayya. Share karein taa ke hukmaran ko ehsaas ho.”* Below it, one lakh twelve thousand views.

The video was thirty-eight seconds long. In it, a young woman in a white coat stood at a bedside writing on a chart. She did not look up. A man’s voice behind the camera said, “Teen ghantay ho gaye hain, koi dekh hi nahi raha,” and the woman kept writing. Then the voice said, “Aap log bas chai peetay ho,” and the woman still did not look up. The video ended on her face, half-lit by the tube light, looking tired and cold and completely uninterested in the old man lying in the bed.

I had not looked up because I was writing his orders. I had not answered because if I had answered I would have cried. None of that was in the thirty-eight seconds.

“Comments mat parhna,” Usman said.

I read the comments. *Ye doctor log qasai hain.* *Inki degree cancel karo.* *Isi liye log private jaate hain.* Someone had tagged the Chief Minister’s complaint cell. Someone else had written my name, spelled wrong, and the name of our hospital, spelled right. Far down, between two angry emojis, one person had written, *Bhai raat ke ek bajay chalees mareez thay aur do doctor, ek larki kya kare.* That comment had three likes.

My phone buzzed. It was Ammi.

***Ammi:** Ye tum ho?
**Ammi:** Khala Nusrat ne bheji hai.*

She had forwarded the video. It had the little double arrow on it that WhatsApp puts on things that have been forwarded many times.

Professor Mirza called me to his office at eleven. Dr. Bilal was already there, sitting on the sofa against the wall with his phone face down on his knee. The professor’s office had a split AC, a framed fellowship certificate, and a shelf of shields. He did not ask me to sit.

“MS sahib ko CM complaint cell se call aayi hai,” he said. “Inquiry committee banegi. Three members. Family bhi aaye gi.”

“Sir, I saw that patient forty minutes before. His reports were pending. There were more than forty patients in the emergency and…”

“Main jaanta hun.” He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “Lekin video mein yeh nahi hai. Video mein sirf tum ho. Family se maafi maango. Likh ke do. Matter khatam karo.”

“Sir, maafi kis baat ki?”

He looked at me as if I had asked him the potassium of a patient I should have known. “Is baat ki ke department ka naam kharab hua hai. Bilal, isay format de do.”

Dr. Bilal nodded. He had not looked at me once.

The inquiry was held two days later in a room next to the MS office that smelled of old files and air freshener. There was a long table with a green cloth. Dr. Khalid Khan, the Medical Superintendent, sat in the middle. On one side of him was an associate professor from Surgery whom I had never met, and on the other a man in a grey waistcoat who said he was “from the cell”. The attendant was there, with an older man who turned out to be his uncle. His name was Rizwan. I had not known his name. I had known his father’s diagnosis, his father’s sugar levels, his father’s creatinine, and the fact that his father liked to sleep with his left arm under his head. I had not known Rizwan’s name.

His father had gone home three days after admission, walking.

The man from the cell asked most of the questions. When did you see the patient. Why did you not respond to the family. Is it hospital policy to ignore attendants. Do you know the patient has rights. I answered what I could. Dr. Khalid wrote things down. The surgeon looked at his phone. At one point Rizwan’s uncle said, “Beta, hum ne kaun sa case karna hai. Bas ehsaas dilana tha,” and the man from the cell said, “Nahi, nahi, aap ka haq hai,” and wrote something down too.

Then Dr. Khalid slid a paper across the green cloth. It had been typed in the MS office in English, with the hospital letterhead at the top. *I, Dr. Sana Iqbal, PGR-1 Medical Unit II, regret the inconvenience caused to the family of the patient due to my behaviour, and assure that such conduct will not be repeated in future.*

I read it twice. Behaviour. Conduct. Repeated. I thought about saying that I had not behaved, I had worked. I thought about saying that there was no one in the room who had stood in that emergency at one in the morning. I thought about Professor Mirza’s face saying *department ka naam*.

I signed it.

In the corridor afterwards, I heard the uncle say quietly to Rizwan, “Ab video delete kar do.”

“Ab main kya karun, chacha,” Rizwan said. “Woh to page walon ke paas hai. Share ho gayi.”

Usman tried to make it a joke for the rest of the week. He called me “Celebrity Sahiba” in the duty room and asked whether I would be doing a morning show. When I did not laugh, he stopped. On Thursday he left a packet of Rio biscuits on my chair with a note that said *One lakh views, one packet. Sorry.*

Mahnoor found me in the washroom corridor, where I had gone to be alone for two minutes. She did not ask if I was okay. She stood next to me looking out of the window at the parking.

“Mere saath bhi hua tha,” she said. “Second year mein. Emergency mein ek patient ki family ne bana di thi. Teen din baad log bhool jaate hain.”

“Aur aap?”

She thought about it for a while. “Main nahi bhooli.”

By the evening it had become a reel, with a sad Punjabi song under it and the words *Insaniyat mar chuki hai* in yellow letters. By the next morning a doctors’ page had posted it too, with a red banner that said *Stand with Dr. Sana* and a long caption about patient load. Forty thousand people liked that one. It used the same thirty-eight seconds, and the same face. The video did not leave in three days. It went from that page to two other pages, and from those pages into family groups, and from family groups into the phones of people I had studied with in school. A girl I had not spoken to since Matric sent me a message that said *Omg is this u?? Hope ur ok!!* with three hearts. Ammi did not mention it again, which was worse than if she had.

My next emergency day was the following Monday. It was the same as every other emergency day, except for one thing I noticed only around midnight. Every time an attendant came towards me, I looked at his hands first. Was there a phone. Was it held up. Was the little red dot on.

I started talking slowly. I explained every order to every family. I said “ji” and “bilkul” and “aap fikar na karein” so many times that the words stopped meaning anything. I looked up from the chart every time someone spoke to me, which meant the chart took twice as long, which meant the next patient waited longer, which meant his attendant came towards me, and I looked at his hands.

Around two, an old woman’s son asked me a simple question about his mother’s drip. I answered it, then answered it again, and then a third time, until he said, a little confused, “Ji doctor sahiba, samajh gaya.” He had no phone in his hand. He just wanted to know about the drip.

Usman watched me from the next bed. “Tu theek hai?”

“Haan.”

“Tu teen dafa ek hi baat bata rahi thi.”

“Mujhe pata hai.”

At four in the morning, sitting on the plastic chair in the duty room, I opened the video again. The view count had crossed two lakh. I watched the woman in the white coat not looking up. I watched her for a long time. I could not decide whether I felt sorry for her or whether I was angry with her. The second one frightened me more.

My phone buzzed while it was still open. Ammi, awake at four, as she always was for Tahajjud.

***Ammi:** Khala Nusrat pooch rahi thi.
**Ammi:** Larki ka mizaaj thanda hai na? Sunday ko wo log aa rahe hain.*

Under it, after a minute, one more message.

***Ammi:**??*

I typed *Ji Ammi* and sent it. Then I closed the video, and then I opened it again.

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***Next in Burnout Room, Part 3: Rishta Sunday.** A post-call Sunday, concealer over dark circles, and a family that wants to know about her “job timings”.*