A big thank you to those who take the time to read my work, regardless of whether or not your feedback is positive or negative, all is appreciated. The below is a true story, with certain elements adapted both for narrative cohesion and anonymity, given our professions. I have tried to write this from a third-person perspective, because I felt adding purely mine or my husband's would be too limiting and one-sided. As such, given it is a reflection of life events involving two humans, things are slow and sometimes frustrating and sometimes just don't make sense - characteristics human beings very often share. So if you are looking for something fast and to the point, I'm afraid this story and series will disappoint. If however, I manage to carve out even a small audience who want to hear more of how this story develops, I will gladly continue it.
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Hospitals have always been environments that stir up strong emotions and passion - both for the people who work there and for the patients. For patients and relatives, of course, there is fear, mixed in with hope. Fear for their relative's wellbeing, kept at bay in a delicate balance with hope that they will get better and leave the hospital. Patients are not immune from this and neither are the staff who work there, including doctors, pharmacists, nurses, healthcare assistants and administration clerks. As much as staff would never admit it, they have their own hopes and wishes for patients. Some - including those patients and relatives who are particularly demanding - may not stir up such positivity, but on the whole, they are all emotionally invested in wanting their patients to do well, and when sad things happen, well, they all feel sad.
Perhaps it is this shared experience of the elated highs and depressing lows of working in a hospital that create a strong physical and emotional bond between staff. Take my hospital ward, for instance, with rumours swirling of at least three consultant doctors who have been sleeping with nurses on the ward, both parties hiding under the veil of wedding rings on their fingers. Then there were obvious trysts between the junior doctors, pharmacists, nurses and even medical and nursing students. The hospital is abound with scandal, but, this shared experience of working in a hospital, as a team, through adversity, seems to evoke a shared understanding amongst all the staff - that whilst scandals happen, we never talk about them for too long, and we never go out of our way to expose them.
It was into this environment that both Rahim and Maryam were thrust. Rahim had graduated from medical school and met Maryam, a pharmacist at the same hospital, in his first job. Junior doctors tend not to have 'fixed' job roles as such, instead, they work in a different speciality or ward for four-to-six months at a time, before moving onto another speciality on ward. Rahim worked for four months on a general medical ward with Maryam, who had graduated the year earlier and knew the hospital better. They were bound to have taken notice of each other - both were British-Pakistani in ethnic origin, Rahim stood at 5ft 10 in height, with an average build and a kind face. He towered over Maryam, who was only 5ft 1, with an average-to-petite build. She had dark brown eyes, usually wore glasses and had curly, brunette hair that came down just below her shoulders. She had a slight hourglass figure and a shapely backside that was accentuated by the mini-dresses, that came down to just above her knee, she tended to wear to work. They took an instant liking to each other and started dating soon after.
It became clear that there was a mismatch in attitudes from their respective families. Rahim's were more conservative, and wanted him to settle down with a 'good Muslim wife, who wears a hijab'. Maryam, however, wasn't quite what they were expecting. Hailing from a more progressive Pakistani family, Maryam had never wore a hijab or headscarf in her life, tended not to pray most of the time and as a result, since university, had worn progressively more adventurous outfits to work, compared to most British-Pakistani women. It was the reasons she was able to wear mini-dresses with tights, that showed off ample amounts of cleavage to work, after all. After some tense few months, Rahim's family had finally given their blessing for him to marry Maryam, with the assurances that Maryam would try to work on her spirituality, by wearing less revealing clothing and starting to pray more. Neither Rahim nor Maryam saw this as an issue, after all, several of Maryam's friends had been married in similar situations, and their husband's had all ensured (slowly, but surely) that their wives started to dress more conservatively and became more spiritual.
As was usual in their religion and culture, Rahim and Maryam had a religious wedding ceremony, but aside from a two-week honeymoon, but were unable to move in with each other just yet. Maryam already had her flat near the hospital but Rahim was coming up to finishing his twelve months at the same hospital, and was due to move to a hospital around sixty miles further north - a commute that would have been too long to stomach on a daily basis. Luckily for Maryam, pharmacists employed in the NHS had permanent contracts where they stayed at the same hospital, unless they actively chose to apply for another job elsewhere. And so, to save money, Rahim settled for cheap and dingy hospital accommodation flat.
Both enjoyed married life - when they had time to spend with each other, which was mainly weekends, where either Rahim or Maryam would drive to each other to spend the day going out for lunches or dinner, and spend nights of passion together. Rahim had lost his virginity whilst at medical school, whereas Maryam was a virgin, but that didn't stop them from having a fulfilling and enjoyable sex life. Maryam did her upmost to ensure she remained attractive to Rahim, whether that included personal grooming, ensuring she didn't gain too much post-wedding weight and of course, ensuring she had a suitable selection of nightwear to entice Rahim.
It was within the next few months that their lives - along with the lives of almost everyone in the world - would change - as the COVID pandemic began to rear its unsightly head. Whilst most of the population's life ground to a half, hospital staff lives merely continued, but under a far greater strain than even before. Rahim was stuck on a cardiology (a speciality of medicine focusing on the heart) ward, inundated by patients with COVID, where the management of such patients were all the same - given them some oxygen, perhaps some steroid medication and hope for the best, because their intensive care unit (ICU) was already full. Maryam, meanwhile, was on the same ward working as a pharmacist, though with the added pressures of checking the drug charts of a vastly greater and more complex number of patients.
During the early days of the pandemic, Rahim and Maryam were technically legally not allowed to visit each other. As it happened, they kept that promise, not least because they did not want to inadvertently spread COVID to each other. And thus began regular FaceTime calls after work between the two, where they would update each other on how their days had gone, along with some more adult conversations later on in the night. They always vented to each other about their stressful day, and this time, Maryam was in a particularly frustrated mood.
