My gloved fingers are deep in a soured pleat of flesh that has not known air or light for years when the body drops past the south-facing window of the cardiac ward. Our second jumper of the year and it’s only January. Another doctor, that’s what the other trainees will say. One of us. I hadn’t seen the first; I’d just come off call and was snatching a scrap of sleep.

This one I see. My hand continues its grim probe, but I am averting my eyes from my patient, his antipathy and shame, so that the body, falling, cleaves my peripheral vision and I know without turning to the window that a life is plunging past. By the time I extract my hand and dash over, the life will be no more.

They’ll say she hoisted herself over the ledge of our apartment building next door and into the knife-cold sky. One of us, they’ll say, because despite the cigarette burns in the Astroturf and the Doritos bags drifting under the HVAC units of the rooftop “garden,” it’s doctors who live here, most of them foreign medical residents. Farahs and Yuliyas and Sunils, thousands of miles from home and mere steps from our place of work. 

They’ll say she wore her white coat, which flapped and billowed as she fell so that everyone would know: she was one of us.

As the body is falling, I’m murmuring about glucose tests, coronary plaques and weight loss. Fruits and vegetables and physical activity. My patient huffs—part sigh, part smoker’s growl. He has already complained about my accent. I want to speak to the doctor.

I palpate for a femoral pulse and say it again: I am the doctor.

What I’m thinking, when the body slices past—snowflakes clinging to the sweep of her hair—is of sleeping. Of nightshifts and fellowship interviews, of securing a permanent placement. Of getting to stay. 

And I’m thinking of my mother, waking up eleven time zones away, window thrown wide to the fleeting cool of morning. Hunger already gathering like a punch. My proud mother, stirring in her thin bed, whose first thought of the day will be for her only daughter, two oceans away in America. A physician in New York City. Living the dream.

Are there no REAL doctors at this hospital? These were the first words uttered by my patient when he woke from the anaesthetic, a rough seam of wire cinching his rib cage shut over his heart’s new plumbing. Now, under my weary hands, he grunts through his teeth to show he’s heard me and glares at the ceiling as if imagining for himself a life lived better, a different path. One that could have led him anywhere but here.