When the Curtain Stayed Open
By Ayoposi Ojelabi · Published: 28 July 2026
2 min read
There are some things hospitals try to protect patients from.
This was not one of them.
I was in intensive care, critically ill myself, when the patient directly opposite me suddenly deteriorated.
At first, nothing seemed unusual. Then the room changed.
Staff began arriving quickly. More people than I had ever seen gather around a single bed. Someone pushed emergency equipment into the room. Others followed carrying boxes I had never paid attention to before. The atmosphere shifted in a way only hospitals can, where urgency arrives before anyone explains why.
Then they began CPR.
In the urgency of the moment, nobody had closed the curtain.
From my bed I could see the team working around the patient. I watched for only a short time before someone realised the curtain was still open and quickly pulled it closed.
The view disappeared.
The sounds did not.
Even with the curtain closed, I could hear what was happening.
The instructions.
The movement.
The rhythm of the compressions.
The urgency in voices that had been calm only moments earlier.
I had not seen everything.
But I had seen enough.
And hearing the rest somehow left my imagination to complete what my eyes no longer could.
A little while later, one of the nurses came over to me. She asked gently whether what I had seen had affected me.
I opened my mouth, and nothing arrived.
Not because I had nothing to say, but because what I had just witnessed had not yet turned into language. It was still happening somewhere behind my eyes, on a loop I could not narrate. She waited a moment, then let the silence stand instead of pressing for an answer I did not have.
It was not only the patient opposite me I was thinking about.
It was myself.
When you are critically ill in intensive care, it is impossible to witness something like that without wondering how close you might be to needing the very same people around your own bed.
The distance between observer and patient suddenly feels frighteningly small.
Before my illness, I imagined intensive care as a place where medicine happened.
Living inside it taught me something different.
It is a place where life can change in seconds.
One moment the ward is quiet.
The next it fills with people carrying equipment, moving with extraordinary speed, trying to pull someone back from the edge.
In those few minutes, I saw nurses, doctors, and the rest of the team respond without hesitation, each of them moving as though they already knew exactly where they were meant to be.
I never found out what happened to the patient.
Perhaps that is why the memory has stayed with me.
Not because I witnessed everything.
But because I witnessed enough.
And for the rest, all I had was the sound behind a curtain.
Further Reading and Getting in Touch
This essay stays inside a single scene from the ICU period this section has been building toward. The next piece continues in similar territory, from a different bed.
If you’d like to share your own experience, you’re welcome to use the Contact page.