- Dr. Adarsh Nath | Letters from the ER
- Posts
- Fever Turns Red
Click "Read Online" at the top of the email for a better reading experience.Fever
27/M
Too young.
Too certain.
Brimming with tomorrows.
After rains,
fever crept in softly.
Heat behind his eyes.
Limbs dragged by unseen weight.
A faint ache dragging his bones.
A dry cough scratching his throat.
Paracetamol.
Water.
Rest.
Waiting.
Seven days.
Nothing urgent.
Then a visit
to a local clinic.
A glance.
A stethoscope.
“ Clear lungs. Likely viral.”
“Take these. Go home.”
He left
with a prescription in his hand.
Trusting time to be merciful,
trusting the world to hold him.
But the world was already sharpening its blade.
Blood
It began with his nose.
A shy trickle.
Tissues stained,
then discarded.
Warnings ignored.
Then the cough tore through.
Ripping.
Relentless.
And crimson.
Hemoptysis.
Hot.
Metallic.
Flooding in his mouth.
By the time he reached us,
lips red,
hands shaking,
eyes pleading:
“Why this?”
Platelets: 24,000 per microlitre.
Dengue hemorrhagic fever.
Then the deluge.
Hematemesis.
Wave after wave.
Sheets soaked.
Kidney tray streaked in red.
Monitors wailed.
Blood gas hissed collapse.
Acidosis choking every cell.
This was no fever.
This was drowning.
In his own blood.
Fight
No time for thought.
Only motion.
Intubation.
Tube sliding into his windpipe
begging mercy.
Four units of platelets.
Bags hung like fragile hope.
Critical care summoned.
Gastroenterology racing in.
Hands blurred,
faces taut,
sweat falling in rhythm
with desperation.
Outside, another stage of grief.
Friends huddled,
with their eyes wide open,
and their voices swallowed.
One whispering his name,
over and over,
as if syllables could tether him to life.
As if calling could slow the flood.
His mother,
small against the weight of it all,
her saree wet with tears,
hands clutching his sandals,
the leather still warm,
his footprints still alive in her hands.
Her lips moved:
“How did my son’s fever become this?”
I had no answer.
Truth too heavy.
Not just fever.
Not just blood.
But days lost to waiting.
To believing in tomorrow.
The Lesson
Dengue wears a mask of mildness.
A fever.
A cough.
A passing ache.
Then rips it away.
Blood surges.
Body betrays.
Time collapses.
It’s not the virus alone.
It’s delay.
The arrogance of youth,
the myth of endless days.
In the ER, I see it often.
Friends frozen in shock.
Mothers grasping sandals, not sons.
Silence louder than screams.
Every life a reminder
of how fragile we are.
Life isn’t always stolen.
Sometimes, we surrender it.
Marcus Aurelius warned:
“Do not act as if you had ten thousand years.
Death stands at your elbow.
Be good for something while you live,
and it is in your power.”
Here, his words are prophecy,
etched in iron-scented air,
speaking to friends,
to mothers,
to a room where clocks don’t tick.
They bleed.
Blood.
Blood everywhere.
Blood in his mouth.
Blood in our hands.
Death waits.
And sometimes,
all it takes is a fever
that waits too long.
If this made you pause, forward it to someone who might need it.
WhatsApp, Facebook, or X - just one click away.
More soon.
Another moment.
Another reminder that we are still, somehow, human in all of this.
Yours,
Dr. Adarsh Nath,
Letters from the ER
Reply