The Federal Medical Center was a world of sterile white and the ceaseless, rhythmic beeping of machines that measured the dregs of life. I was no longer a person; I was a collection of data points on a screen, a failing system whose collapse was being meticulously documented. Consciousness was an archipelago of fleeting moments in a vast sea of darkness. I’d surface for a second, aware of a tube in my throat, the scratch of starched sheets, a nurse’s gentle touch, before the tide of oblivion pulled me under again.
Each time I surfaced, I felt them. The doctors and nurses, a frantic team of warriors fighting a battle on a field that had already been salted and burned. They were pumping fluids, adjusting drips, calling out numbers that meant less and less. They spoke of renal failure, of sy
