I need you to understand how cold that room was. It smelled like industrial bleach and old cabbage, the kind of heavy, wet smell that sticks to the back of your throat. My bed at St. Jude’s Hospital was pushed right against the window, and the wind from the Indiana plains kept rattling the loose glass.

I had a thin hospital sheet that did nothing to stop the draft.

My body felt like it had been run over by a semi-truck. The emergency C-section had gone completely wrong, and I had lost almost three pints of blood. My baby boy, Leo, was down a long maze of corridors in the NICU, hooked up to tubes that I wasn’t allowed to see. The daytime nurses were so short-staffed they barely had time to throw a plastic tray of cold broth on my bedside table before rushing out.

And I was entirely, completely alone.

I keep going back to that first night because it was the hardest. My husband, Tyler, had left for his annual hunting trip in Michigan two days before my water broke. I remember calling him from the bathroom floor when the contractions started. He just sighed into the phone. He told me his mother had worked a full shift at the grocery store the day she had him, and that I was just being dramatic.

“Call an ambulance if it’s that bad,” he had muttered. I could hear his friends laughing in the background. Then he hung up.

So there I was, 24 years old, sitting in a dark room with a fever of 103, listening to the steady, mechanical beep of my heart monitor. I didn’t even have the strength to push the call button anymore. Every time I did, a voice over the intercom would just tell me someone would be there soon. Nobody ever came.

But then, around midnight, the heavy wooden door creaked open.

A woman slipped into the room. She was wearing faded green scrubs that didn’t have the official hospital logo on the pocket. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I was just so grateful to see a human face. She had silver-gray hair pulled back in a messy bun, and she smelled like vanilla and lavender. It was the cleanest, sweetest smell in that whole miserable building.

She didn’t say much at first. She just walked over to my bed, took off her watch with the cracked glass face, and set it on the nightstand. Then she went to the bathroom and came back with a basin of warm water and a clean washcloth.

She didn’t ask me for my insurance card. She didn’t check my chart. She just began to gently wipe the dried sweat and blood from my forehead.

“You’re going to be okay, mama,” she whispered. Her voice was low and steady, like a warm blanket. “I’ve got you. You’re not alone.”

I started crying, and she didn’t try to make me stop. She just let me hold onto her sleeve while she brushed my hair out of my sticky eyes. Later that night, when I asked about Leo, her face softened. She told me she would go check on him herself.