I woke from a coma to discover that surviving could feel unbearably lonely. Every night at eleven, a woman in scrubs sat beside my bed, until a nurse insisted nobody worked that shift. Then I found a note in my bag, and the truth about my only visitor left me facing something I could never have begun to imag… Continues…

For two weeks after I regained consciousness, no visitors came. But at 11 PM each night, a woman wearing scrubs pulled up a chair and stayed for exactly thirty minutes. She never checked a monitor or took my pulse. She simply talked with me. When I asked a nurse how to thank her, I was told nobody worked that shift and that I must have been hallucinating. The explanation left me questioning the only companionship I’d had.

Then I discovered her message tucked inside my bag. She wasn’t a nurse; she was another patient, one who knew she would not survive. Her son had died alone, and something about me reminded her of him. She couldn’t change his final moments, but she could make mine less lonely. She asked me to live kindly and sit with someone who needed company. The woman I’d wanted to thank had given me a way to do it.