The night my husband Daniel was admitted to the hospital after a terrible car accident, my entire world shrank down to the sharp smell of disinfectant and the rhythmic beeping of medical machines that counted out his heartbeat in electronic pulses.

He’d been driving home from work on a Tuesday evening—just a regular commute on a regular day—when another driver ran a red light at full speed and T-boned his sedan. The impact sent Daniel’s car spinning across three lanes of traffic before it finally stopped against a concrete median.

The doctors told me he was incredibly fortunate to be alive, though they warned that recovery would take many weeks, possibly months. So I practically moved into that hospital room, sleeping in the world’s most unforgiving chair beside his bed and surviving on terrible vending-machine coffee and the kind of constant anxiety that sits like a stone in your stomach and never quite leaves.

That’s when I first became aware of the elderly woman in the bed next to Daniel’s.