- Dr. Adarsh Nath | Letters from the ER
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- The Tenth Stroke
The Whisper Before the Strike
32/M
They carried him like something precious.
Not broken.
Just… unfamiliar.
Like a dream you couldn't wake up from.
“Name?”
“Age?”
“Where does it hurt?”
He answered them all.
Bright. Alert. Even smiled.
“I was just plugging in my phone charger,” he said.
And then,
the story paused.
No loss of consciousness.
No scream.
No collapse.
Just a brief flicker.
That’s when -
his left leg forgot it belonged to him.
His right palm blistered.
Left leg powerless.
The marks of godless electricity -
entry and exit.
He had not passed out.
He had passed through.
Through a household socket.
Through 220 volts of current.
And when he came out on the other side,
he was no longer whole.
The Stroke That Made No Sense
His ECG was perfect.
Vitals, stable.
No burns deep enough to worry.
So why couldn’t he move his leg?
Why did his leg feel like stone?
Why was there no flicker,
no plea from his muscles?
We scanned his brain.
And there it was -
a white-hot infarct in the right MCA territory,
A key region in the brain. A cruel one.
A stroke.
A bolt of death inside a living mind.
I scoured through the literature.
There are only nine documented strokes
following an electrical injury.
He was the tenth.
I was the witness.
He blinked slowly as we told him.
“What?”
“How?”
His voice trembled with confusion.
Sometimes the devil comes in 220 volts.
And exits your body, taking your leg with him.
The Gamble of Healing
We called Neurology.
They suggested thrombolysis -
a clot-busting injection.
We went down the checklist.
No contraindications.
Explained the risks.
He said yes.
Of course he said yes.
When the body betrays you,
you grasp at anything that sounds like salvation.
We pushed Tenecteplase.
The Russian roulette of Emergency Medicine.
Uneventful.
Just a quiet man,
lying beneath fluorescent lights,
waiting to feel his leg again.
The Echo
He was discharged five days later.
Still couldn’t walk properly.
Still couldn't explain what happened.
We blamed vasospasm,
or direct vascular injury.
Or some elegant theory
that made us feel less helpless.
But the truth is -
we didn’t know.
A list of possibilities.
A sprinkle of Latin.
A hope that someone else, somewhere else,
might find the answer we didn’t.
He left with a dragging foot and a blank stare.
And I -
I stood in the ER with his memory still warm in my mind,
wondering what god lives inside a wall socket.
The Light Beyond the Wound
The world didn’t pause.
Phones kept charging.
People kept laughing.
Nobody noticed the man who brushed against death in silence.
But I did.
He is etched in me.
Not as a case.
Not as a miracle.
But as a wound,
where light now seeps through.
That even the most ordinary gesture -
plugging in a phone -
can tear open the abyss.
There is no safety.
Only the glow that follows the break.
And so I heed Rumi’s words:
“The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
He survived,
And I write,
letting the tenth stroke illuminate my own scars.
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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
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