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CARE HOSPITAL nursing staff is a group of extremely caring individuals. The kindness is completely genuine. On Saturdays, Nurse Happy-Go-Lucky brings you fresh bagels and cream cheese. These are supposed to be for the nurses only, but she shares with you. It feels so good that she would do that.
    You take a long look at the bagel with cream cheese. It occurs to you that you are very lucky to have it, very lucky to have a nurse like Brenda who will bring you something good to eat on a sunny morning like this—you’re grateful for that, too. And for a heart beating inside your chest. Even with some things not working like they used to, even with half of your body gone, you’re alive and there is a window, and luminous sun bouncing orange light off the wet street, and the city waking up and getting ready to go to work. But here you are watching it instead of driving southbound on Route 128 and someone you like just gave you a bagel. It’s the best bagel in the world.
    You are weeping, staring at the window, staring at the bagel, so grateful for it you don’t want to spoil it by picking it up and eating it.
    You need help. Chewing is difficult—you keep biting your tongue and cheek. Cream cheese must be all over your face. You don’t care. You’re supposed to be here. God wanted you to be here and receive food from someone who wanted to feed you something she was supposed to be eating but she gave it to you instead. God put you here. God kept the heart in your chest beating. God gave you this food through Nurse Happy-Go-Lucky.
    So you could do something.
    You don’t really know what it is though.
    Bring it on.

Don’t Leave Me This Way
    WHEN YOU WERE A KID, you thought riding in an ambulance would be exciting—going fast, passing all the other cars, sirens screaming. You never thought about the reasons that might make you a passenger in one. The child in you liked the idea of the frenzied activity, the urgency.
Mom driving all of you to swimming lessons, the wood-panel Country Squire station wagon, and an ambulance would shriek past you. Mom silenced everyone and told you all to pray a Hail Mary for the faceless, genderless occupant of the ambulance. You liked to think that your prayers gave the (presumably) dying person a fighting chance.
    Now it’s your turn for someone to recite the Hail Mary for you. You are the injured stranger to your fellow commuters. The transport from critical care to the next leg of your journey, the rehabilitation hospital, is jolting. You can’t hear any siren. Jim is following along behind—or so they keep assuring you.
    The ambulance is sweltering. Your head and neck are damp with sweat. You are strapped on your back to a stiff, unforgiving gurney. Your body feels every single bump in the road. It’s excruciating. When the ambulance hits one of the many potholes, your central nervous system rattles and explodes, your body gets increasingly stiff, and you feel it trying to coil like a spring. But you’re tied down, so you can only feel stiffness and spasms. You hit another pothole and the explosions and spasms start again. You wonder if this is what rigor mortis is like.
    When the ambulance finally arrives at its destination, you are jostled out of your tiny moving torture chamber into a much larger stationary torture chamber—the rehab hospital.
    The critical care hospital was always extremely clean. The floors gleamed, and the rooms were pristine and modern looking. Even as they wheel you into this place, you can tell from the smell of it and the look of the ceiling tiles that you are entering a place that is old and worn out. You don’t like it.
    There are no rooms available on the neurology floor. Brain trauma must be more popular than heart problems: They find you an open room on the cardiac floor until a room in the neurology unit opens up.
    The emergency medical technicians bring you into a room with two beds and a harsh fluorescent light that is oddly off center. You are