Walking Medical File
The documents glow on the computer screen before me, cold and clinical, revealing a chronicle of everything I was never told. I only meant to pull up my recent MRI scans—another appointment, another needle in my back, the body forever rebelling—but the past, silent and patient, waits there too. A hospital file stretching back to 2010, to the place where I swallowed too much of something I can’t even remember now, to the two days I spent in a coma, the four in critical care, my lungs filled with tubes, my blood funneled through machines because my kidneys failed me too. My body, like my mind, keeps an immaculate record of collapse.
I feel like I am reading the story of a stranger, someone tragic and distant, but the case number is mine. My name is there in bold, undeniable, tethering me to every grim detail. It is obscene, really, to see my suffering condensed into sterile paragraphs, to know that there were people standing over my unconscious body, documenting the slow decay of someone I was too lost to recognize. I had thought my unraveling was sudden, a cataclysm, but no—it was deliberate, precise. A slow-motion wreck. The universe taking notes in margins I never thought to read. And maybe that’s how it always is.
I scroll through the pages, feeling my stomach twist, the weight of it pressing against my ribs. More entries, more proof of how many times I have walked to the edge, teetered, fallen, crawled my way back. I don’t know how to hold all of it at once—the fear, the grief, the absolute astonishment that I am still here. The realization that my body has carried me through a war I have waged against myself. It is a brutal and tender thing, this knowing.
A tidal wave of emotion rises, thick and unrelenting. How do I even begin to name this feeling? It is terror—visceral and raw—at the thought that my mind is capable of leading me to such darkness, that something inside me can twist reality so completely that survival no longer feels like an option. The chemical chaos in my brain, the tangled mess of trauma and illness, the moments when my prefrontal cortex abandons me, leaving me to the mercy of something primal, something that doesn’t care whether I wake up or not. I shudder, thinking of the person I was, of anyone who feels that depth of suffering, of the unbearable weight that makes oblivion seem like relief.
But there is something else, something softer breaking through the terror—an aching, overwhelming gratitude. My heart beats against my ribs, insistent, alive. I have survived. Despite the wreckage, despite the nights I thought would swallow me whole, I am still here. And that is no small thing. It is everything. My body, battered and bruised, has refused to quit. It has fought for me even when I could not fight for myself. It has kept breathing, kept pushing, kept pulling me back when I tried to slip away.
I press my hands against my skin, feeling the pulse beneath, whispering apologies into the hollow spaces where pain once lived. I have spent years resenting this body, punishing it, cursing it for what it could not do. But tonight, I bow to its resilience. I owe it tenderness, after everything. I owe it love.
Life is precious. Not in the way people say when they have never truly feared its loss, but in the way that only those who have stood at the precipice can understand. I have been there. I have looked into the abyss, and yet something—fate, science, love, sheer stubbornness—pulled me back. And now, I get to wake up to more moments. More sunrises. More laughter. More hands reaching for mine. More art. More love. Even more pain, yes, but pain is proof that I am still here, still feeling, still alive.
Perhaps we are all walking medical files, our bodies recording our histories with quiet precision. But we are more than our records. We are more than our wounds. If survival has taught me anything, it is this: even the most broken things can be rebuilt. Even in our darkest hours, there is always, always the quiet insistence of hope.
So I close the files. I exhale. And I choose, again, to live.
