Do you remember the night you shattered?
The floor outside her room was littered
with debris—gloves and masks and empty
vials, remnants of the war you lost.
They took her body away and left you,
staring at your own hands. She was young and pregnant, you said,
as if that alone could summon her back,
as if that one fact could erase
the hours you spent inside that room,
chasing her heartbeat with desperate fingers
until there was nothing left to catch. The Delta surge had us all burning.
You were untouchable,
a stone in the storm, the doctor
we all looked to when our hands shook.
But you stood there hollow-eyed,
cracked open and emptied out.
And I saw how easily it could happen to me. The next morning, you were gone.
I kept waiting for you to come back,
to fill the eye at the center
of the chaos, but your pager lay silent
on the counter, and your name stayed dark
on the schedule, a hole that widened
with every shift. I didn’t want to be you.
But the patients kept coming,
their lungs filling like waterlogged boats,
their eyes searching for anyone
who could promise they'd float.
I stepped into your storm
one trembling foot at a time,
and the weight wrapped me
like a second skin. There was no time to wonder
if I was ready, if I could be
what they needed. I knew what
awaited me. I had watched it
erode in your hands, felt
its shadow cross my heart. This work is a quiet violence,
a tender, brutal unraveling.
To hold each life sacred,
to lose it anyway, and to keep going
with blood-stained sleeves,
knowing all too well
that one day, I might split open
just like you did. Still, I put on my mask,
my gloves, my shield. I steady
my hands, quiet the shaking,
stand at the bedside of the next
and the next, facing down the ghosts
that press like fog against the walls.

Lizzie Benge is a sleep medicine physician, first-year attending, and faculty member at Harvard Medical School. Lizzie writes about the intersection of medicine and humanity, capturing the quiet, powerful moments that reveal the resilience of patients and doctors alike.