Every morning I knew I would be asked to do things that mattered. Every night I thought of things I could have done better but never doubted that they were worth doing. The dreams were awful—lots of IV tubes, bloody urine bags, and gray bodies on steel gurneys—but since even those knit me to people I cared about, I let them in. Feeling those splinters of other people’s pain seemed like the least I could do, if only in my dreams.
