The patients cling to us. They think we have answers. We think we have answers. But every night I go home and all I have are numbers echoing in my head—oxygen saturation, pulse rate, blood pressure, beeping monitors. I try to sleep and see lines, peaks and valleys, the last rhythms of strangers.

My fear is that my daughter won’t get her stem cells before Putin starts a nuclear war; she will be left here with nothing in her bone marrow. If she gets the transplant, we have two days at least after that.