I wrote a letter to him. It said, “My name is Myra and I’m fifteen. I’m here every day visiting my mother, who is right next door to you. If you want, I could visit you, too. I could bring a deck of cards and a transistor radio. Maybe you could come outside in a wheel-chair.”

My mother was upset when I told her about the letter. “Why are you doing this?” she said. “You, Miss Antisocial!” And I couldn’t tell her, because if she could ask such a question, she could never understand the answer. He was my age! He lived in a small room, attended by medical personnel and family members who almost never spoke. He did not get phone calls, he did not put records on a turntable, he did not read books or swim or stay up late watching monster movies. He did not smell cut grass or walk barefoot down a warm sidewalk. He did not slowly peel back the wrapper from a Snickers bar and sniff before he bit; he did not go to ball games or swimming. Day after day, he lay in a room with the shades pulled, silence hanging in the air like fog. How could you see that and not want to do something?

When I got no answer to my letter, I sent another. Which he never got to read, because he died. When I heard that, I locked myself in a hospital bathroom and wept. And vowed that I would never be helpless in such a situation again. I would make it so that I could walk into any sick person’s room and offer comfort, especially when that comfort was so sorely needed, so sure to be taken.

I went on and on, talking about how I decided after high school to go to nursing school, how I loved every minute of it. I said I found learning about the body to be an exercise in sustained astonishment. How could I not? The eye, the way it translates an image! The vigilance of the brain; the elegance of the skeleton; the dark mystery of hormones; the specificity of muscle tissue types! I described reading about the awesome workload of the heart; the complicated balancing of the respiratory system; the dependence of nerves on the myelin sheath; the swift passage of red blood cells coursing through the sixty thousand miles of the circulatory system.

Even as a student, I was the one they called to start IVs when no one else could. I got NG tubes down fastest: I, not even twenty, my hair in a ponytail, my life experience nil, threaded a tube down an innocent nostril while some formerly dignified patient, now robbed of individuality, sat upright in a patterned cotton gown, hands clenched, eyes watering, trusting me. And forgiving me.