An excerpt from Real Medicine, Unreal Stories: Lessons and Insights from Clinical Practice.

The magnolias were blooming early this spring, their pale pink petals fluttering down onto the worn brick pathway outside the hospital courtyard. Dr. Eva Cardenas wrapped her thin white coat tighter as she waited on a bench, the same one she used to eat lunch on during the worst months of 2020, six feet apart from everyone else. She’d brought coffee in a flask—two mugs—and a memory she wasn’t sure she wanted to share.

Dr. Rajiv Menon arrived ten minutes late, still with the same brisk, clipped walk, but now a little slower, his salt-and-pepper beard fuller. He saw her and smiled, a little sadly.

“Five years,” he said, sitting down. “They call this an anniversary? Five years since the lockdown? Feels like both yesterday and someone else’s lifetime ago.”

“Maybe both,” Eva replied, pouring coffee into the mugs. “You take sugar?”

“I used to,” Rajiv said. “Stopped during the pandemic. Figured if I had to choose a vice, it’d be sleep deprivation instead.”

They clinked mugs anyway.

For a few moments, they just sat, watching the sun spill onto the courtyard stones. Across from them stood the new wing of the hospital—state-of-the-art, LEED-certified, and born out of federal COVID relief funds. The irony wasn’t lost on either of them.

“You know,” Eva began, “I thought I’d feel more… resolved today. Like the anniversary would be some kind of closure.”

Rajiv nodded. “I don’t think medicine really does closure.”

She glanced sideways at him. “But we were there, Rajiv. Every day. We saw it. The exhaustion. The tears. The bodies. All of it. And now, it’s like it never happened.”

“They remember the toilet paper shortages,” he said, voice dry. “The school closures. The TikToks.”

“But not the nights we had to bag three bodies before lunch,” she murmured.

Silence again.

“I still remember that week in April,” Rajiv said, “when we had to double up patients on ventilators. I didn’t think that was even possible until we did it. And you—God, Eva, I still think about you running that code while your mom was on a vent two floors down.”

Eva stared into her mug. “And yet… they talk about how the lockdowns ruined everything. The economy, education. And sure, they did a number. But they saved lives too.”

“Hard truth,” Rajiv said, “is that most people only mourn what touches them directly. We lost one in 300 Americans. And still no national day of mourning. No memorial.”

“No reckoning,” Eva added. “No real investment in public health. Just… scapegoating. Defunding. Conspiracies.”

“You know what breaks me sometimes?” Rajiv asked. “That we showed up. Every damn day. When we didn’t have enough PPE. When we didn’t have treatment. When we didn’t even know if the virus stayed on surfaces or floated in the air. We still came. And now we’re just tired, burned out, or gone.”

“Or worse—mistrusted,” Eva added bitterly. “Remember when the vaccines came out? We thought it was the beginning of the end. But it turned into a referendum on truth.”

“We trained for disease, Eva. Not disinformation.”

They sat there, as spring sunlight warmed their backs and the wind rustled the new leaves.

“But we did learn things,” Eva said suddenly. “We learned that nurses are the backbone of every hospital. That teamwork means trusting someone to hold your life in their hands. That moral injury isn’t some abstract concept—it’s what happens when you have to choose who gets the last ECMO bed.”

Rajiv looked up, eyes clouded. “We learned to build ICUs from scratch. Learned how to whisper hope through glass doors. And we learned that fear… doesn’t go away. It just lives quietly beside you.”

“And we learned,” Eva added, “that silence is dangerous. That if we don’t tell the story, others will rewrite it for us.”

She reached into her bag and pulled out a slim notebook. The cover was plain, leather-bound.

“I’ve been writing about it,” she said. “Not for publication. Just… to remember. For my kids. For me. For anyone who one day asks, what was it like?”

Rajiv stared at the notebook as though it were sacred.

“Tell them,” he said quietly. “Tell them we weren’t heroes as much as we were simply human. Tired, terrified, sometimes angry—and always trying.”

“I will,” she promised.

A nurse walked by, pushing a wheelchair. Behind them, a child laughed as cherry blossoms danced in the wind. Life, stubborn and persistent, continued.

“You think we’re better prepared now?” Rajiv asked.

Eva shook her head. “Not really. The systems are still brittle. Staffing is worse. Public trust is frayed.”

“But we know more,” he said.

“We do. But knowledge isn’t the same as change.”

Rajiv stood up slowly, joints creaking. “Then maybe that’s the work of the next five years.”

They walked together toward the hospital, a little older, a little more worn, but still moving forward.

Behind them, the petals kept falling—quiet as memory, soft as grace.

Arthur Lazarus is a former Doximity Fellow, a member of the editorial board of the American Association for Physician Leadership, and an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. He is the author of several books on narrative medicine, including Narrative Medicine: New and Selected Essays, and Narrative Rx: A Quick Guide to Narrative Medicine for Students, Residents, and Attendings, available as a free download.