🌙 A Porch Light Essay

Apparently, there are many ways to become memorable during a hospital stay.

Mine involved sleeping so deeply that an entire medical team struggled to wake me—and the only response they managed to get was:

“Are you printing out the book?”

I had not slept the night before. By the following evening, I was carrying more exhaustion than my body knew how to hold. I had not received my nighttime pain medication or Klonopin. When they came to give me a breathing treatment, I was already falling asleep.

The doctor looked at me and said, “Go to sleep. Your body needs it.”

So I did.

A little too enthusiastically, apparently.

While I slept, people came into my room and tried to wake me. They called my name. They shook me. They slapped my cheeks. The charge nurse came in. Someone brought Narcan into the room as a precaution, although they never had to administer it.

My vitals were good when they checked them. Even my blood pressure—the number that had spent much of my hospital stay behaving like it had joined an experimental theater troupe—was behaving itself.

But I remained deeply asleep.

Bridger was there, watching the concern grow around me. When I finally responded, I did not ask where I was. I did not ask why everyone was standing over me. I did not offer some profound message from the edge of consciousness.

I asked him if he was printing out the book.

Because of course I did.

He then had to explain the website, the books, and everything I have written to a room full of worried medical professionals. By the next morning, it seemed as though every person in the hospital knew what had happened. Nurses knew. Doctors knew. The hospitality crew knew.

I had become hospital folklore overnight.

When I woke the next morning, there was an oxygen tube in my nose.

My first thought was not especially poetic.

It was closer to: What the hell happened, and why am I wearing this?

My husband filled in the missing pieces. Everyone else filled in the rest.

I can laugh about it now because I am home and well enough to laugh. Humor has always been one of the ways I make room beside the frightening things. It does not erase their seriousness. It simply keeps fear from occupying every chair.

And fear has already taken up enough space lately.

In the past six weeks, I have had two experiences that came much closer to death than I am comfortable admitting. The first came when internal bleeding left me needing a transfusion of two pints of blood. Before I had fully understood what that experience had done to me, I found myself back in the hospital again—my blood pressure swinging, my body exhausted, and life once more feeling far more fragile than it had only weeks before.

I have written openly about my health across every platform where I share my life and work because, from the beginning of Voice With a Purpose, one of the promises beneath everything I have built has been to remain honest and relatable.

I want readers to recognize something of themselves here. I want someone living through a frightening diagnosis, a complicated body, or an exhausting season to know they are not the only one.

I have never wanted to appear here as a carefully edited voice floating above the ordinary realities of having a body.

This body hurts.

It bleeds.

It becomes tired.

Sometimes it frightens me.

Sometimes it frightens everyone else while I am peacefully unconscious and apparently managing publishing logistics from another dimension.

That openness is not a request for sympathy. It is part of what I have always promised you. If I am going to write about courage, survival, belonging, and what it means to remain, then I cannot quietly remove the parts where remaining is messy.

I cannot write only after the danger has passed and everything has become a lesson.

Sometimes there is no lesson yet.

Sometimes there is only the strange experience of returning home.

Home feels wonderful. It also feels different in a way I cannot fully explain. The rooms are the same. My bed is the same. The familiar things are sitting exactly where I left them.

But I am not standing among them in quite the same way.

After coming so close to losing your life, ordinary things can feel both comforting and unfamiliar. You are grateful to be home, but some part of you is still wandering the hospital corridors. Some part of you is still listening for the monitor, waiting for the next blood-pressure reading, or wondering who will walk through the door.

Your body has come home before the rest of you has completely caught up.

I am still physically and mentally tired. I am still getting short of breath. I have the medication for my nebulizer and will pick up the machine Monday morning.

But I feel well.

Not perfectly restored. Not transformed into a shining monument to gratitude. Not pretending I have already made sense of everything that happened.

Just better.

Much better than when I entered the hospital.

These two near-death experiences have given me thoughts and perspectives I am still learning how to carry. Some are grateful. Some are frightened. Some are tender. Some are angry. Some have no language yet.

I do not intend to force them into meaning before they are ready.

Perhaps that is the strangest part of coming home: realizing that survival is not the conclusion of the story. It is simply the place where you open your eyes and discover that the story is still being written.

I do not yet know what these past six weeks will become inside me.

I only know that I came home.

I slept.

I woke up.

The words are still here.

So am I.

And, for the record, I would still like to know whether he printed out the book.

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There is room for you here—even when coming home feels strange.

The porch light is on.

🌙 From the Hospital Room

Sometimes choosing to live begins with believing that your life is worth interrupting the world for.

There are moments that divide a life into two parts.

Before.

And after.

I did not know I was standing at that dividing line.

I thought I was having anxiety attacks.

My heart raced. I could not catch my breath. Walking to the bathroom left me depleted, and rolling over in bed felt like climbing a mountain. Every movement demanded strength my body no longer seemed to possess.

Like so many people who live with chronic pain, I did what I had trained myself to do.

I minimized it.

I explained it away.

I told myself it would pass.

I wondered whether I was overreacting. I worried that the hospital staff would think I was imagining it. Anxiety can make the heart race. Anxiety can steal the breath. I had lived through enough of it to convince myself that this was simply another version of something familiar.

But my body was telling the truth.

I went to the emergency room.

They performed an EKG, drew blood, and took a chest X-ray. Then came the waiting—the particular kind of waiting that makes a person begin doubting why she came at all.

Nothing seemed urgent.

No one seemed alarmed.

Eventually, I went home.

Then, in the middle of the night, the hospital called.

My blood work had returned, and they needed me to come back immediately.

My hemoglobin was dangerously low.

It was not merely a little below normal. At 6.4, it was less than half of what it should have been.

Suddenly, every symptom made sense.

The breathlessness.

The pounding heart.

The weakness.

The exhaustion that felt deeper than sleep could reach.

My body had not been betraying me.

It had been spending everything it had trying to keep me alive.

When I returned to the hospital, everything began moving quickly. More blood was drawn. An IV was placed. Plans were made for a transfusion and a transfer to a larger hospital in New Orleans.

The blood began slowly.

For fifteen minutes, they watched me closely for a reaction. Then the physician ordered it to continue at a careful trickle so it could run throughout the ambulance ride.

I remember looking at the dark red line flowing through the clear tubing and realizing that someone I would probably never meet had once chosen to give part of themselves to a stranger.

That stranger was now me.

Their kindness was traveling through plastic tubing and into my future.

I arrived at West Jefferson Hospital with donated blood still flowing into my body. By then, my hands and arms had become maps of the journey—needle marks, bruises, tape, tubing, and punctures where nurses had searched for veins willing to hold one more line.

Beside one of those IVs was the small heart tattoo on my hand.

I had seen that tattoo thousands of times.

But lying in that hospital bed, it looked different.

Surrounded by the machinery keeping watch over me, the little heart seemed almost like a message:

You are still here.

Later, I was told that if I had stayed home, I could have slipped into a coma and died.

No one can know with certainty exactly what would have happened. But hearing those words from someone caring for me forced me to understand the seriousness of what I had almost dismissed.

I had come frighteningly close to believing that my life was not important enough to inconvenience anyone.

That realization wounded me in a place no needle could reach.

I have spent years encouraging other people to trust themselves.

To honor their pain.

To ask for help.

To believe what their bodies are telling them.

Yet when my own body pleaded with me, I questioned it.

I called its warnings anxiety.

I called its exhaustion weakness.

I called its desperate effort an overreaction.

Still, it fought for me.

Every racing heartbeat was an attempt to move oxygen through a body that did not have enough blood to carry it.

Every breath was labor.

Every trembling step was my body refusing to surrender quietly.

And I almost apologized for making a fuss.

There is another part of surviving that no one talks about enough.

During the emergency, there was no room to understand what was happening. There was only the next step.

Wake Bridger.

Go to the hospital.

Return when they call.

Hold still for the needle.

Accept the blood.

Enter the ambulance.

Reach the next hospital.

But once the immediate danger began to ease, the emotions arrived.

I lay beneath the hospital blanket feeling overwhelmed, frightened, and strangely absent from my own life. I wanted to pull the covers over my head, cry, and disappear—not because I wanted to die, but because I had only just begun to understand how close I had come.

My blood levels were improving.

The monitors looked better.

But my mind and heart had not caught up.

They were still standing in the night when I could not breathe.

They were still hearing the phone ring.

They were still trying to comprehend that I had nearly stayed home.

And beneath all of it was another ache: the feeling that once the blood had been given and the numbers looked better, everyone else could move on.

But I could not.

My body had survived the emergency.

My spirit was only beginning to process it.

Tomorrow, doctors will perform an endoscopy and colonoscopy to search for the source of the blood loss. They may find an ulcer. They may find another answer. There will be preparation, procedures, and another chapter of this experience to tell.

But tonight, this is not an essay about medical tests.

It is an essay about choosing to live.

We often imagine that choosing life must look heroic.

We picture enormous declarations, fearless decisions, and sudden transformations.

But sometimes choosing to live is much quieter.

Sometimes it looks like waking the person beside you and saying, “Something is wrong.”

Sometimes it looks like going back to a hospital you already left.

Sometimes it looks like pressing the call button again, even when you fear the nurse is frustrated with you.

Sometimes it looks like allowing strangers to care for your body while you are too frightened and exhausted to care for it yourself.

Sometimes it looks like accepting another person’s blood because your own can no longer carry you alone.

And sometimes choosing to live means recognizing that your pain does not have to become unbearable before it deserves attention.

I did not feel brave.

I felt weak, anxious, frightened, and uncertain.

But courage is not always a feeling.

Sometimes courage is simply the next decision.

I woke Bridger.

I went to the hospital.

I answered the phone.

I went back.

I accepted the transfusion.

I entered the ambulance.

I arrived.

I stayed.

That is what choosing life looked like for me.

So, if you are reading this while wondering whether your symptoms are serious enough, please hear me:

You do not have to prove that you are suffering before you are allowed to ask for help.

You are not wasting anyone’s time by taking your body seriously.

You are not difficult because you need care.

You are not dramatic because you are frightened.

Your life is worth interrupting the day for.

Your body has a voice.

Mine whispered.

Then it pleaded.

Finally, it screamed.

And at last, I listened.

Tonight, beneath the tape, the bruises, and the IV tubing, there is a small heart drawn permanently upon my hand.

A little heart beside the blood that was given so mine could keep beating.

A quiet reminder that I am here.

Not untouched.

Not unafraid.

But here.

And for tonight, that is enough.

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The Quiet Evidence

These images are not here to shock. They are here to honor the truth of what the body carries while fighting to keep us alive.

Until our next visit…

Take gentle care of yourself.

And should your body be whispering something you have been trying to explain away, perhaps today is the day to stop arguing with it.

Listen.

Ask for help.

Choose the next step.

Your life is worth the interruption.

I’ll leave the porch light on.

With love,
Casey
Voice With A Purpose

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Keep the Porch Light On Between Visits

If these words felt like home…

I’d be honored to leave an occasional letter waiting in your inbox.

Sometimes it’s a new essay.
Sometimes it’s a blessing.
Sometimes it’s simply a reminder that there is still room for you here.

No noise.
No pressure.
Just occasional words waiting for you whenever you need them.

Keep the Porch Light On

I’ll leave a light on for you between visits.

We have been taught to recognize courage by its movement—the brave decision, the difficult climb, the moment someone rises.

But no one tells us enough about the courage of the days when rising is the very thing we cannot do.

There are days when courage does not stand tall.

It does not speak confidently, move mountains, or resemble the triumphant stories people tell after the hardest part has passed.

Sometimes courage lies beneath the covers, trying to gather enough strength to place two feet on the floor.

Sometimes it is making the phone call you are afraid to make. Admitting that something does not feel right. Allowing someone to help with what you have always managed on your own.

And sometimes courage is returning to bed without turning your need for rest into evidence against your worth.

I have come to know these days more intimately than I ever wanted to.

While my body was asking me to stop, rest, and receive help, my mind was saying something very different.

You are overreacting.

You are being a burden.

What if you go to the hospital and they do not find anything?

But fear did not speak with only one voice.

Another part of me was whispering:

Something is wrong.

What if you are bleeding internally?

What if you stay home when you should have gone?

One fear told me to seek help.

The other told me I had not yet earned the right to ask for it.

And there I was, caught between them—already sick, already frightened, and unsure which voice I was supposed to trust.

Fear has a way of making us question the very signals meant to protect us. It convinces us that we must first prove we are sick enough before we are allowed to need help. We begin to fear the embarrassment of being told that nothing is wrong almost as much as we fear that something is.

The bravest thing I did was not walking through the hospital doors.

It was waking my husband.

Bridger was already hurting. His back needed rest, and I did not want to ask him to carry one more thing. I knew how much the past weeks had already asked of him. I did not want to frighten him again or tell him that we might have to return to the emergency room for the third time in one week.

I wanted to protect him.

But I was frightened, too.

Waking him meant admitting that I could not manage this alone. It meant trusting that my need for help was not an imposition upon his love.

Sometimes love means caring for someone.

Sometimes it means allowing them to care for us.

That second kind of love has always been harder for me.

The world knows how to celebrate a comeback. It understands perseverance when it can see someone moving forward. But it does not always recognize the quieter battles—the ones fought inside a tired body, an uncertain mind, or a life that has suddenly become much smaller than it was before.

I feel as though I should be able to do something.

I should at least be able to walk to the bathroom without struggling. I should be able to clean something, wash the dishes, or take care of the ordinary pieces of my own life.

But right now, I cannot.

It is difficult to be basically bedridden when so much of your identity has been tied to what you can do for yourself and others.

Ordinary tasks begin to feel like measurements.

The distance between the bed and the bathroom measures how much strength you have lost. The dishes you cannot wash seem to measure how far you have fallen from the person you believe you should be. Another day spent sleeping feels like another day you have somehow failed to live.

But a sick body is not a moral failure.

The dishes do not determine my worth.

The things left undone are not evidence that I have become less valuable.

And needing someone to help me does not make me a burden.

I know this because I know exactly what I would say to another woman lying where I am now.

I would tell her:

Please take care of yourself.

Your husband cares about you. He does not want anything bad to happen to you.

Yes, it may be frustrating to return to the emergency room for the third time in one week. But things are still happening inside your body. Your body is talking to you, and you need to listen.

Please go and get checked.

You are not being burdensome.

You are sick.

It is strange how easily compassion comes when it has someone else’s name.

I would never ask that woman to prove her suffering before she deserved protection. I would never point toward the dishes or the unmade bed and tell her they mattered more than her life. I would not call her weak for waking the person who loves her.

I would call her brave.

Perhaps those are the words I must now learn to offer myself.

Knowing that I deserve protection does not always silence the conflict inside me. It does not immediately quiet the voice that says I am overreacting or asking for too much.

But perhaps courage does not require that voice to disappear.

Courage is not always feeling certain that I deserve protection. Sometimes it is choosing to protect myself while the conflict inside me is still arguing otherwise.

Perhaps courage was never about proving how much I could continue doing while my body was asking me to stop.

Perhaps courage was waking Bridger.

Accepting the wheelchair.

Leaving the dishes undone.

Returning to the hospital even when I was afraid they might not find anything.

Allowing myself to sleep without apologizing for it.

Letting the people who love me help carry what I cannot.

Believing that I am still worthy of care when I cannot be the one providing it.

There are days when we rise.

And there are days when courage is admitting that we cannot.

Those days may never look brave from the outside. There may be no victory anyone else can see—only a woman lying in bed, frightened, reaching through the darkness to wake the person beside her.

But perhaps that is what courage looks like sometimes.

It does not always rise.

Sometimes it reaches for the person it loves and quietly says:

I need help.

TAKE THIS WITH YOU

When Courage Looks Like Reaching

A free three-card reflection and journal companion.

When fear and self-doubt begin arguing with what your body is telling you, this companion offers three gentle places to begin:

Listen. Believe. Reach.

Inside you’ll find three printable reflection cards and one guided journal page for separating the voice of fear from the voice trying to keep you safe.

Download the Free Companion

No signup. No pressure. Take what you need.

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Keep the Porch Light On Between Visits

If these words felt like home…

I’d be honored to leave an occasional letter waiting in your inbox.

Sometimes it’s a new essay.
Sometimes it’s a blessing.
Sometimes it’s simply a reminder that there is still room for you here.

No noise.
No pressure.
Just occasional words waiting for you whenever you need them.

Keep the Porch Light On

I’ll leave a light on for you between visits.

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Until our next visit…
Take gentle care of your heart.
I’ll leave the porch light on.

With love,
Casey
Voice With A Purpose