Leah’s roommate is a young girl just coming out of spine surgery. Though the curtain between us gives an illusion of privacy, we can hear everything. We hear her vomit after trying to drink something. We hear her cry a hoarse, high-pitched, “Mooommmmy!” every time the nurses reposition her—a cry so quietly desperate that I want to cry too. In that cry, I hear Leah, lying in the ER trauma room with a badly fractured femur, as the nurse explains they’ll have to move her leg to get a good X-ray. I hear myself, waking from surgery, my legs on fire inside their heavy plaster casts, sickened by the lingering taste and smell of surgical gas.

And I’m not sure which story to believe: The one about the miraculous ability of modern medicine to fix problems that used to be unfixable, or the one about the pain that no amount of drugs or toys or soothing words can banish.