It’s 4:30 in the morning. I can see the small clock across the room. I lie in a hospital bed. The woman who approaches, the nurse, I know a bit. She greets me with, “I need to take your vitals.” I know there is more to her message, but she doesn’t say so yet. The light around my bed is dim.

I’m in a hospital, a large one in a fairly large city. I have been here for about three days now. I expect to leave today.

When she’s done with taking my temperature and my blood pressure, my pulse too, she motions what I know is coming. She knows I know what she will say. “The labs need a little more blood.” Lots of blood taken here is my experience. I could swear there exists in the bowels of this hospital a vampire waiting patiently for its latest feeding, waiting hungrily for my blood.

“Can I put on my more powerful light?” she asks.

“By all means,” I reply. Lots of light when you’re about to stick me again, I think.

I am asked to lay my hand, my left hand, on a flat hard surface and told not to move. All of this is said good-naturedly. I know this woman works 12-hour shifts. Hers is to end at 7 a.m., a couple of hours from now. I know also she lives in New Albany, Indiana, across the river from where I live in Louisville, Kentucky. She is not from New Albany; I already know this from an earlier conversation. I think she said she comes from California originally. She likes it here, she tells me. Much less expensive than California, she could say, but does not.

She works three 12-hour shifts in a row each week, night shifts. A pleasant woman in her forties, I would guess, and colorfully dressed. She has several children but does not say how many. No mention of the father of the kids. Makes me think such fathers are long gone. Who knows where? I ask a lot of questions of these strangers, which helps the time pass. I’m interested too in their lives.

The sticking begins. Apologetically, she says she requires this time to get two vials of blood, although small vials. I don’t ask what for. Trying to make a bit of conversation, I say, “You know I write stories. I guess this might become one. I mean the needle, the jab at 4:30 a.m.”

She is curious and asks what I write about.

“Oh, I’ve been doing it a long time,” I tell her. “It began after college when I lived on an Indian reservation in South Dakota. At first I wrote only these western stories, but eventually, I wrote about a lot of things. Even wrote longer works, novels.”

Getting stuck isn’t always as quick as you might like. A vein is found, the needle goes in, and blood is sucked out—maybe not sucked, but it comes out. Seems to take longer than it ought to. I don’t look, but it feels as if the needle moves around as the blood is coaxed out of my hand. I do have good veins, not hard to find. I am grateful for that.

I don’t say any more about my story writing, except to note how it has really never resulted in any meaningful payment. A few publications, yes, but far from any notoriety. It’s got me to thinking, why bother? Why do I do it? By now it has to be a habit, and I guess I see it as something I do that not too many others do. Or something like that.

As I age, and I am approaching 83, I think I know why I write: There is always the chance, the possibility, accidental maybe, that I will stumble upon truth. Truth is an elusive commodity, by the way. Not so common as people think.

I remember one Indian reservation story I wrote early in my time there. It was about ten pages long, and I began to circulate it among the small magazines I knew of. One reader commented early on in this process, saying something close to this: It is all here, the dust, desolation, the death. Terrible, terrible truth, but the author’s vision is better than his writing skills.

Writing skills or not, the story I figure possesses truth. Someone should want it. So I continued to send it out, one at a time, and by mail and for years. First, to the big magazines like The New Yorker and Atlantic. No interest from the big boys, so I tried the small fry, the largely unheard-of publications, some very small, with circulations under 50, is my guess. Nobody wanted it there, either. There could have been a hundred submissions, perhaps more. But always, NO!

One day the story was picked as part of a contest I entered, and there was a prize of $500. Others were selected, too, and a couple of years later, a rather large collection of these stories was published. It was reviewed in the Sunday New York Times Book Review section, and the reviewer didn’t like the volume, which he said he found a great sameness in most of the stories. He made an exception though. You guessed it!

My much-abused Indian reservation story was named as an exception, along with several others. He wrote that my story pushed against “tidy formulations.” Since that time, the story has appeared in other volumes, alongside stories by Mark Twain and George Orwell. Not bad company, I figure.

What brought me to this hospital was that I’ve been falling down now and again. It is not something awfully new for me, but this last time I was on the sidewalk near my house and I couldn’t get up. A young woman and her boyfriend came along—I happened to know the lady; I’ve lived on this street a long time. They took me to a hospital. Her boyfriend is a fireman in Louisville and has opinions of where to go. Of course, I made the pick myself. I chose the one he thought best, and thus began this medical experience.

Overall, I have to say I am satisfied with my pick. Critical? Sure. Some few of you readers want to hear the particulars, I am guessing. Nobody really came up with a definite explanation as to the reason for my falls, except to rule out a problem with my legs. It is thought I may have a heart problem. Further tests are to follow.

I acquired a cane. For thousands of years, persons like me have been told to get a cane. I’ve lived a long time with little in the way of illness, so I mustn’t complain too much in this writing.

I met several doctors. All seemed capable, but one I thought memorable. He was the head man in the facility. He was called “the hospital doctor.” He came into a room where I sat and introduced himself. A nurse was present also. He asked me to say what had happened in my own words. I wasn’t sure what other words I might use, but went ahead. He made his presentation complete with what he thought could be wrong. It wasn’t awfully long, and it seemed well thought out.

He was somewhat slight in build and wore a white coat doctors wear. He was totally bald. He could have shaved his head for all I know, and he had several days’ growth of dark facial hair. That probably is a look he wished to present to the world—several days of beard. He had kind of a light step, a jaunty gait, I’d call it.

I often ask questions of persons I encounter, so I did that with this fellow. I asked him how old he was. For experience counts, something I value—maybe all of us do or should value experience. As a young man, about age 20, I learned to fly and became a licensed pilot. I don’t do a lot of piloting today, but when I travel in an airplane I like to see that the pilot in the left-hand seat (where the pilot is in command) is older, perhaps a bit stout, perhaps graying. EXPERIENCED.

The doctor smiled at my query and asked me, “How old do you think I am?”

Surely in his thirties, I thought. Late thirties, probably. “Thirties,” I said. He replied, saying he was forty. He was about to leave the room.

“Where did you go to school?” I asked next.

“Israel,” he replied with no hesitation.

I didn’t hesitate in what I said next. I told him the massive bombing of Gaza by Israel and the killings of many thousands of innocent people, lots of them children, was a horror. I didn’t say what I was thinking, that the 50,000 number bantered about almost had to be low. Probably, it was more like 100,000.

He stopped and looked at me hard and said slowly, “It is a very complicated situation,” but he didn’t condemn it. He didn’t tell me that the Israeli leadership was wrong in what they did. I didn’t expect to hear the word “evil” from his mouth, but I expected more than I got. More than “a complicated situation.”

Raymond Abbott is a social worker and novelist.