Author: Putra Vatakal

Burning rays rained on the Petaling Jaya roads without mercy. Squeezing the steering wheel, I swerved into the empty parking spot and jumped out, slamming the door. Isabelle waved me toward the main glass doors, squinting in the glaring sunlight. The patient was positioned, shoulder exposed and ready. Ready to receive the gleaming arthroscope. Only… this […]

Sitting in the breezy waiting area of an SOP compliant barbershop gives you time to contemplate the important things in life… like how you shouldn’t have destroyed your standard-5 classmate’s DragonBall Z comics by reading them in the bathroom, and how much less hair there is on your head nowadays.  Oh, well, nothing lasts forever, […]

Late in July 1960, the Bunga Raya was picked to represent the courage of our little nation, growing in the eyes of the world. If you wondered, ‘Bunga’ means flower, and ‘Raya’ carries hints of a joyous celebration. We had some of these plants in the garden, and when I was little, the growing boy […]

As the Indian ship pulled into port, dock workers scrambled to steady the gangway against the side. A lean bespectacled man descended- tan overcoat flapping in the strong wind of the East African shoreline. My grandfather. As he unpacked crates of bicycle-parts in his Uganda shop, I wonder if he would ever have thought about […]

Stepping smartly into a ward where I promptly reported for duty to a patient’s relative who mistook for my consultant – lab coat tails tucked between my legs, I crawled back to the nurses’ counter for help. It was my first day as a house officer. And I little then knew that this pattern – […]

A surgeon voluntarily drops the ‘dr’ from his or her name to remember the days when our operating theatres were nothing more than a hut people visited to have a boil popped and their hair chopped. Though they confuse patients, the Mr and Ms Surgeon labels are worn with pride – the idea of a […]

Orthopaedic Surgery is sometimes considered one of the ‘colder’ branches of medicine. Now, this doesn’t mean that Ortho surgeons aren’t inherently hot or anything like that (they fortunately are  ). What it means is that… especially in the eyes of a young house officer… that there’s a lower chance of having your ward patients drop dead […]

The brown car sped up the road sending clouds of dust waving through the quiet plant nurseries of Sungai Buloh Drive. Up the ramps the wheels turned, then I screeched to a stop in the UiTM Private Specialist Centre car park, flung the door open and jogged down the sunny road, briefcase swinging in my hand… to […]

CHAPTER 1 (To skip the story and just learn about Trigger Finger, go straight to Chapter 2) Warm air hisses through the painted vents as the LRT train slides out of the station. The crowd mobs the turnstiles toward the exit…among them a bald man mopping sweat off his neck, glancing back across the crowd […]