Content warning: This article contains references to suicide. If you or someone you know are in need of help, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988.

Picture this – it’s 2022, you have been staring at the same wall for a week when you decide: you have lived long enough.

For months, the thought has lingered: “I don’t want to be here.” But it has never felt final. Until now. You lie on the floor, sobbing so hard you forget what breathing is supposed to feel like. You have spent your life moving forward, but suddenly, there is no forward left.

Your work in clinical research has been the last thing tethering you to the world. You are part of a historic neurosurgical trial to implant stem cells into ischemic stroke patients, attempting to restore movement where none remained. The science is meticulous, the process exhausting, but the potential to change lives is undeniable.

Yet, even in medicine, no one teaches you how to save yourself.

There are systems in place to resuscitate a heart, to preserve brain tissue after ischemia, to restore function to limbs that have long been still. But where is the protocol for the doctor, the researcher, the nurse who feels themselves deteriorating in real time (see: burnout)? They are taught to diagnose others, to measure suffering on standardized scales. What scale measures the silent, unseen weight carried by those in medicine? What is the love story behind those who give it endlessly? It’s surprising to see how creative one gets to scale up rock bottom.

You run at night past “The Angel of Grief,” her marble body slumped in eternal mourning. In her dismantled presence, you see yourself in this marbled antithesis: where emotionally collapsing is considered beautiful (see: post-mortem). A monument to loss, still standing.

You should have seen this coming. Depression has always lived around you, but never in you. You thought you were immune. You were not. You empty your wishes out into the sky with the hopes a shooting star hears you. How can you expect the dead to reprise affection (see: grief)?

October 2022 arrives with a diagnosis: adjustment disorder with excessive dysphoria, PTSD. It’s hard for others to notice when you are bleeding in full bloom on the surface, crying in the rain to feel a little less alone, surrounded by other tears (see: trauma).

They say love is supposed to be a kind of reprieve, but you have never known it that way. Yours growing up has always been conditional: something given sparingly, taken back without warning (see: lack of empathy). The kind that demands to be proven, chased, earned. The kind that turns absence into a weapon.

And maybe that’s why it took you so long to recognize what was unfolding in the operating room.

You would rather stay in bed and rot, let the weight of yourself fold inward. But there is no option for that. The patient is here. So, you move, even when every cell in your body begs you not to.

It’s ironic being on the other side of mental health — no longer seeing it from the view above. Society begs us to hear others before it’s too late, yet — unless you pay your entire life savings to a professional —  who is there to listen? How many people really understand how difficult it is to open up (see: excessive shame)? Not to feel like a burden or judged? Is this the aftermath of trauma? More suffering?

When you step outside the confining tunnel vision both put you in, you remind yourself you do this because you care. You reinforce positive energy, though oftentimes, it is left in the void. Despite it all, there is this burning desire to do it again. To rebuild something from the wreckage, from your crooked past. Maybe, today is the day your spine is built upwards.

The surgeon moves with precision, his voice steady, his hands unwavering. Love, but in its purest form: uncomplicated, undeserved, freely given. No expectations, no conditions, no waiting for it to be taken away. A patient in need. A physician who answers. You are suddenly reminded that there is love out there. It is incredibly unfamiliar and so nourishing. This is not a typical love story, but it’s the most genuine form of one — unconditional and pure.

And you, who have spent so long searching for meaning, realize you are watching it unfold in front of you. For the first time in months, you feel something other than pain.

I do not want to die.

The dark clouds do not vanish, but I can finally see through them. The weight of your suffering is still there, but so is something else — something you had forgotten how to recognize.

Hope.

Love is the doctor who dedicates their life to restoring function. Love is the patient who reminds you why you are still here.

I’ve always believed my purpose existed to help others. I never considered that medicine, in its own strange, imperfect way, might be the place where I save myself.

It is unfamiliar, but I recognize it now. This is home.

This patient saved my life (see: empathy).