Roger put his head down and pushed the gurney past Ward 17, his long floppy fringe hiding his face. He was the sort of person that no one noticed and he liked it just fine that way.
He glanced at his out stretched arm and the bandage he’d wrapped around his left wrist. Last Christmas his mother had bought him a Fit Bit with a purple wrist band. He hated the colour purple so had taken a bandage from the stores cupboard when no one was around. Every now and then he would lift it up to check how many steps he had done. On a busy day he could notch up to thirty thousand steps walking the never ending maze of corridors in the hospital.
Since Christmas he had walked the Great wall of China and was currently on course for the Russian Railway badge. But what he loved most of all about his prized piece of hidden technology, was that he could see his red pulsating heart on the neat square screen. It reminded him he was alive. He didn’t understand why all patients didn’t have one. Surely it would be cheaper than those big machines they got hooked up to.
Later that morning on his coffee break his pager began bleeping. He watched the orange letters crawl across the screen.
Ward 12. Bay 2. Gurney pick up.
He drank the last of his instant coffee, then ran his tongue across his dentures feeling the graininess it had left on them. Then, slipping his hand under his fringe, he surreptitiously removed them and hid them under the sheet on the empty gurney. Ward 12 was normally full of older men like him. Maybe this time he would get a better fit.
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