Should you call a surgeon on his private number after work hours? Should s/he feel compelled to respond to your Whatsapp? Here’s looking at phone etiquette in matters of life and death

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There is some fleshy stuff coming out of his nose,” Vicky’s doctor called to say, backing it up with a very tentative,

“I think it’s a tumour, but I’m not sure.” Probably because no one would expect something so freaky, I thought.

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“Send him over, I’ll take a look,” I said instantly, because almost nothing surprises me anymore. Vicky was 30. He came from an unheard-of town in Uttar Pradesh. He had some on-off bleeding from the nose, for which the village doctor kept prescribing medication until it started to get out of hand. “My nose is blocked,” he told me, dabbing his scarlet handkerchief. “And the headache is driving me mad,” he said in Hindi, breathing from his mouth. “His left eye seems to be bulging out more than normal too,” his sister, sitting next to me, pointed out. I shone a torch into his nostril and saw that his nose was full of “stuff”. He could not smell and had very poor vision in his left eye. I immediately shunted him off to the radiology department to image his entire head, and, like I said, I wasn’t surprised.

There was an 8 cm ghoulish tumour occupying the nose; it had eroded the wall of the left orbit and gone into the eye. Like a rodent, it had corroded the base of the skull and got........

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