“Do you know what it feels like, to know you could die at any moment?” His words linger in the air, heavy, long after the threat of violence has passed, long after our team has calmed him with words and soft gestures. It is not the first time a patient’s family member has swung at me, nor will it be the last. But it is the first time with a patient so close to death in the room, with family so distraught that social rules and etiquette are abandoned for raw grief and emotion. A family I had thought I had good rapport with, until understanding turned to anger, heralding an attack I did not foresee.

He soon leaves the clinic, but the half-apology burrows beneath my skin, crawling, scratching. Uncomfortable. The clinic space feels more unsafe than it did this morning. In a gap between patients, I open the news on my phone, looking for a distraction. My screen fills with images of starving children and injured families, some without limbs, some without hope. Their eyes scream out to me: “Do you know what it feels like, to know you could die at any moment?” I turn my phone face down on my desk, and turn back to the EMR.

Several hours (and patients) later, I leave clinic. I walk down my usual end-of-the-day route, passing the old children’s hospital as I wind my way through campus. A police car zooms by, so quickly it raises the hairs on my arm. Moments later, a second one follows.

Odd.

I unlock my phone, curious. A text alert has just arrived: “Active shooter… Run, hide, fight.” What? My mind patches together pieces (Where am I? Who is around me? Which direction did those police go? Am I walking the right way? Can I hear gunshots?). But the seconds of panic melt into memory as a scream fills the air, air sirens. A warning.

I have never heard sirens like that before. Sirens like that override any other thought.

My feet start running before my head catches up. I run towards the closest building. There is a cluster of nurses, leaving for the day, by the door. “There is a shooter!” I say. Or something like that. “Run! Run! Can we get in here?”

We can. Inside is a ghost town, an empty waiting room, empty desk, empty. My feet still run. The air sirens follow me. One of the nurses reads a text update. But all the doors are locked. We try one, two, five, fifteen. “We need a door that locks,” someone says. “We need to hide.”

But there is nowhere to hide. The beautiful floor-to-ceiling glass windows let light stream in, and anyone outside (or inside) can see our plight. It is too open. I can see the building where my office is, a locked door, with a key on my lanyard. But it is across the street. And here, the floorplan is wide open. There is nowhere to hide. The sirens are blaring. My phone is buzzing.

And the words come back to me: “Do you know what it feels like, to know you could die at any moment?”

But death is alone. I am not alone. We work together. There are elevators. There is a sign: up to Building B. Building B, that is where we need to go. Building B, with a locked door and a key around my neck. We push the button. The elevator does not come quickly enough. I push again. And again.

Eventually we make it to my office. Eventually we turn off the lights, lock the door, hide in the corner. Eventually the updates start coming through: speculations, shelter in place. Eventually we learn who, where, when, and why. And, eventually, we get thoughts and prayers from those who were not on the ground, running.

But I know something now, that I did not before.

As an oncologist, I thought I was comfortable with mortality. That I had confronted it, envisioned it, embraced it. I have seen hundreds of people die hundreds of different ways. I have lived through natural disasters, teared up from turbulence on planes, ran from shady characters on dark streets. I have even been in the stairwell as a shooting happened in the emergency department on the other side of the wall. But never before had I looked death in the face in the broad light of day and known that, possibly, it was coming for me. And I could run, and I could hide, but could I run fast enough? And where was there even a place to hide?

Is this how patients feel, when we tell them of an incurable illness with a short prognosis? Is this how it feels to learn of a diagnosis with a low cure rate? Is this how it feels to have a doctor sit across from you and tell you that, very shortly, you (or your loved one) is about to die?

Do you feel like running, but find all the doors locked?

I wish I could say that there was some sort of insight or brilliant loophole this experience taught me. But there is not. Cancer is still cancer, death is still death, and I can change neither of those things any more than I could before. There is only a little more understanding than before, a shared suffering, an appreciation for the ephemeral nature of a mortal life.

And, maybe, the next time someone asks (do you know what it feels like, to know you could die at any moment?), I can pause a little more, to consider their words, and to consider what they might be feeling in that moment. To show a little more humanity, in the suffering that we all share in, in the face of an ending we will all come to. To be quietly grateful that it is not my day today, and to bear witness to those whose day it is, embarking on the frontier that, perhaps, we will never truly understand. And, in the moment, even if we cannot find a place to hide, maybe I can help them feel a little less alone.

Beatrice Preti is an oncologist.