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The Waiting Sanctuary

Tonight the ER is a temple without a prayer.

The doors open to no one,

then close again with a soft, obedient bow.

The stretchers wait like abandoned posts,

silent soldiers in the dim light.

Monitors glow like faint lanterns,

their green lines tracing heartbeats that do not exist.

The air tastes like disinfectant.

Sharp, sterile, a sacred sting.

I walk the corridor slowly,

my footsteps the only ritual left.

Every sound is exaggerated,

amplified in the quiet void.

The hum of ceiling lights,

the soft tick of a clock

that seems reluctant

to announce another hour.

Some nights this place roars

like a carnival of grief.

Sirens howling,

doors crashing open with urgency,

the hiss of oxygen cutting through nerves of steel,

and the slap of hurried feet against time.

But not tonight.

Tonight the ER waits.

The Covenant of Catastrophe

Emergency Medicine survives on storm.

It thrives on the covenant of catastrophe.

Bring us your broken,

and we will wrestle life back from the dark.

The pact is simple.

We give our bodies,

our sleep,

our sanity.

In return,

the world sends us suffering

and calls it

purpose.

But what happens when the storm stays silent?

I pace the bays like a godling,

whose disciples have vanished overnight.

Each bed an altar,

once soaked in blood, sweat and defiance.

Here, a heart surrendered and was taken back.

There, lungs clawed for air and found it.

Now the altars are bare,

their white sheets folded with ceremonial precision,

their silence ringing like a bell

that no one comes to answer.

If no one suffers,

who am I to serve?

If there is no blood to staunch,

does my calling still exist?

If the night offers nothing to save,

do my hands still matter?

The darkness gives no reply.

It only deepens,

like a question

that refuses to answer.

The Ghosts

I lean against the nurses’ station

and let the ghosts pass through me.

The child who clutched her mother’s hands,

fingers trembling with fear.

The mother whose heart we shocked back,

only for grief to claim her days later.

The boy with a cracked skull,

whose father’s sandals

squeaked against the floor

as he tried to outrun despair.

Their faces flicker across sterile, white walls,

half-memory,

half-sacrament,

etched in the echoes of hope.

This should be a blessing.

Every empty night means

someone out there made it home alive.

No heart stopped on a street corner.

No child woke to the terror of airless lungs.

The absence of suffering

is the prayer we whisper

beneath the roar of chaos.

And yet stillness carries its own weight.

It strips away the armor of urgency

and leaves only the bare machinery of self,

exposed and vulnerable.

It forces me to hear my own heartbeat

and wonder

whether I have built my worth

on other people’s disasters.

Have I confused purpose with adrenaline?

Is my identity nothing more

than the echo

of someone’s tragedy?

The silence does not soothe.

It interrogates.

It presses its cold fingers

against the softest places,

and waits for the confession to surface,

a truth buried deep inside my heart.

The Unanswered Prayer

Perhaps this is the cruel paradox of medicine.

We pray for quiet,

but when it arrives

we do not know

how to kneel.

Just then, the fluorescent lights flicker,

like a poltergeist.

A brief, nervous shiver,

a tremor in the stillness.

It feels like a warning,

that the gods of chaos will return

without notice,

without mercy.

But what if they never return?

What if my world simply stops needing me?

What if the silence stretches into forever,

and the temple becomes nothing more

than a monument to forgotten prayers,

a relic of lost purpose?

I stand in the centre of the ER.

A priest without a prayer.

Learning how to worship absence,

to find grace in empty bays and empty hearts.

Learning how to stay faithful

when there is nothing to serve, no one to save.

If this made you pause, forward it to someone who might need it.

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More soon.

Another moment.

Another reminder that we are still, somehow, human in all of this.

Yours,

Dr. Adarsh Nath,

Letters from the ER

Disclaimer:

Patient details have been changed to protect confidentiality. This is a personal reflection, not medical advice or substitute for professional care.