It's safe to say that, as a practitioner on an inpatient neurology floor, I get to be a spectator of peoples' lives in ways that others wouldn't. It's not necessarily a good thing; most of the patients fight a huge battle of recovery after illness or injury, and some have absolutely no one to care for them or even verify their identity, which is heartbreaking. It's difficult to think of what their life had been like, oh, 72 hours before their stroke/onset of infection/what have you. But watching the interactions family members have with their ill loved ones is both enlightening and an admonition. You see, it seems like there are two types of people: ones who visit you in the hospital and ones who don't. And the ones who visit you tend to return. And those people are the rocks that make this whole thing personal and worth fighting for. They give that patient a story and make us realize, in our day replete with more sick people and innumerable tasks, that this person is not just another slice of MRI with diffusion restriction or set of comorbidities bound in muscle and organs and bone.

There were two couples on the floor celebrating wedding anniversaries today, one 64 years and the other 56 years. The moving, transcendent part of this is the way the healthy person sees the sick one. The patient had longstanding dementia with an acute bleed requiring surgery but knew who his wife was. He slowly handed her a card; a folded-up piece of white computer paper made with the nurse's help, Happy Anniversary carefully scribed and below, an arrowed heart with their initials in the middle. She cupped his face in her palm, the staples still fresh on his shorn skull, then kissed his hand adoringly as if he was royalty. I can't imagine what that amount of time with one person would be like, and unless I live to be 95 I won't know. But it gives me something to strive for, to be that person who fights for healing, for a voice for the vulnerable, who hopes for a miracle but is realistic when the situation is grim, but above all, who loves someone wholeheartedly.

When my grandfather was dying after his second stroke, I stood in the doorway of that hospital room and listened to his groans as he tried to communicate with my mom at his bedside. I was 19 and terrified, paralyzed and selfish, and my grandmother was the one grasping her husband's hand and smoothing his hair. I don't know what makes marriages last or how people don't end up hating each other after a year but I know what love looks like, and I can only hope that we all have it some day.