Room 1, ICU — Love on life support

This was a busy Saturday in 2022.

06:45 — I walk into the unit and spot a gray-haired man pacing outside Room 1. Clothes rumpled, air sharp with sweat. The moment he catches my white coat he stops.

“Doctor, any updates for me?”

Through the glass I glimpse his world: a woman in her late twenties, motionless beneath a sedative drip; a breathing tube taped to her mouth; the ventilator doing the work of her lungs. A brand-new admission—I wasn’t here yesterday.

“I’ve just come on,” I say. “Let me talk with the night team; if you’re listed as next of kin, I’ll come right back.”

“I’m her to-be husband,” he answers, the words shaking between pride and panic. The age gap sparks an uninvited question—What’s the story?—but hand-over starts at seven, and my obsessive-compulsive personality protests if I’m not ten minutes early.

07:00 — chart review, then back to Room 1

Pieces fall into place: long-standing epilepsy, a month in jail, seizure medicine withheld by bureaucracy → massive seizure, airway secured with tube and machine. It has happened before, but this time there is fever. She has injected drugs since age fifteen. Brain infection? The fiancé clings to a chair, talking in torrents. In that flood, he reveals a forgotten diagnosis—an old infection on her heart valve—a detail no one else had mentioned.

When I try a brief medical update he breaks: flew overnight from Florida, forty-eight hours without sleep, yet refuses the visitor lounge. He will not leave the woman he loves. Again the silent question—excessive devotion? What’s the story?—but charts and rounds pull me away.

Consent

We need a lumbar puncture to test her spinal fluid. He wants to call her mother first. Fine—her number is on the chart. We will also need an MRI, so I ask, while he listens: Any metal implants? None. When I hang up he murmurs, almost wounded, “She doesn’t have any metal. You could have asked me—I know everything about her.”

And I believe him.

14:00 — another hurdle

Her IV fails; no usable veins left. The next step is a deeper ultrasound-guided line. I ask him to step into the hallway and explain the brief procedure. He nods, paces, returns as I finish.

“Doctor … her tattoos—they’re OK, right? She designed them herself. She loves them.”

Only then do I truly see her arms: vibrant ink, stories woven into skin. Through his worry, the colors look almost luminous—beautiful enough that Van Gogh might have envied them.

I stop wondering what the story is. The story is love—unfiltered, inconvenient, fiercely attentive love—scarce in the everyday world and rarer still in an ICU, yet powerful enough to stop even a busy physician in his tracks. Before each shift, I review protocols for seizures, infections, failed airways. Nothing prepares me for the protocol of a heart that refuses to leave a bedside. Technology may keep someone alive; devotion keeps them human.

Syed Ahmad Moosa is a rheumatology fellow.