Slowly, I rose and backed away about ten feet, keeping my eyes on Compton. Carefully, she rolled the young woman onto her side to check her airway, exposing as she did a large bleeding gash at her hairline. It was clear the woman had also bitten her tongue; blood from the tongue laceration mixed with the frothier substance bubbling up from her airway, trailing down onto her uniform and staining the white collar of her shirt in a large red blotch fading to pink at its margins. Ignoring the urge to flee as the others had, Compton inspected it more closely. “Pulmonary hemorrhage,” she said quietly.

The seizure had stopped. Compton pressed two fingers at the woman’s neck. “Febrile,” she said, more quietly. “She’s blazing.”

“Does she have a pulse?”

After a moment, Compton nodded: she located a weak pulse just as a rattling gasp issued from her patient’s throat; her body had not quite given up. I marveled at this, as I have many times before: how, in the face of catastrophe, human beings are still programmed to grasp at life, to fight, to summon every resource they possess into the effort to defeat whatever is killing them. The human body is complex and miraculous beyond comprehension. It begins, somehow, from the mysterious and unknowable void of the subatomic world. From there it is constructed of atoms assembling into molecules, molecules assembling into cells, cells assembling into tissues, tissues assembling into organs, organs assembling into systems, all of it somehow alchemizing together into the miracle of sentient life. We burn with the desire to exist. At the end, a person throws everything they have into a white-hot supernova of resistance; one final subcellular blaze before they’re gone. I’ve always loved the famous line from the poet Dylan Thomas, which expresses the biologic reluctance to die more beautifully than I ever could: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

This woman raged. Her young body, unwilling to concede defeat, still struggled for air. Each breath sounded like a last stand, a desperate, futile howl against extinction. Gently, Compton positioned her to allow for optimal drainage from her nose and mouth, noticing as she did something interesting on the woman’s hand. She held it up.

A steel wedding band graced her finger: somewhere soon, someone was going to receive some devastating news. My gaze slid down the woman’s finger as Compton squeezed her small hand. Her nailbeds were bright blue.

Suddenly her back arched again. I thought it was the onset of another seizure, but instead it was a death rattle; one final breath sucked in. She was gone.