Reslience

Before this story begins, there is one simple piece of truth you need to know. After dozens of bouts of sepsis, my vascular surgeon told me I had run out of IV access. Every usable vein had scarred over. There were no remaining options, and the time between infections was growing dangerously short. Hospice was not dramatic or sudden. It was the logical next step.

This is the story of what came after.

Resilience: A First-Person Reckoning

I survived hospice.

Not in the way people usually mean it, but in the literal sense.

I was the patient. I was the one in the bed, the one they whispered about in the hallway, the one everyone had quietly begun to say goodbye to. What started as a routine diagnosis eventually took several sharp turns. Doctors shifted from confident, to cautious, to quiet, and then somehow I made it through.

But I did not feel lucky. I felt unfinished. They told me, “You are going to live,” but no one explained how. No one told me how to wake up in a body that no longer felt like mine. No one prepared me for what it would feel like to reenter rooms where people had already imagined my funeral. No one explained how to return to daily life after illness had drained every resource and every reserve.

Everyone else exhaled. I was still holding my breath.

It felt like standing beneath a sky where the thunder had already passed but the lightning had not yet arrived. That is what resilience looked like for me. Not courage. Not triumph. Just showing up again and again, even when nothing felt certain.

There is no parade for surviving. No finish line. No guidebook for what comes next. But here I am. Still upright. Still waking up. Still figuring it out.

Photo by Alex Shute on Unsplash