The Hospital and Me: A complicated friendship

Jun 8

As I write this, I’m sitting in a beautiful room inside a hospital in the UAE. The kind of space with soft lighting, beautiful views, calming scents, and comfort all around.

But none of it softens the truth: someone I love is in surgery right now.

And just like that, I’m taken back — to where so many of my stories began and ended.

Because no matter how polished the walls, how serene the surroundings, the feeling remains the same.

I have a love-hate relationship with hospitals.
They’ve held the best and worst of my life.
They’ve taken, and they’ve given.
They’ve made me feel seen — and completely invisible.
They’ve broken me open and stitched me back together again.
They know parts of me no one else does.

Before I moved to the UAE, I was a nurse for many years — and those years taught me more about humanity than any textbook ever could.

The Daughter in Me

Seeing my father in a hospital bed as a child was deeply confusing. I didn’t know how to hold the fear I felt, only that I wanted him home — back in his chair, back to being mine.

Hospitals were the first place I felt the ache of wanting someone back.
And the first place I understood that love could feel like powerlessness.

The Student Nurse in Me

On the stroke ward, I once looked after a man who was recovering beautifully. We chatted, laughed — we truly believed he’d be going home soon.

Then one morning, I arrived and his bed was empty.
He had passed away in the night.

I cried — not just quietly in the break room. I cried with his family.
Because in that moment, I wasn’t just a student nurse. I was a human bearing witness to a journey that had ended.
That’s what nursing teaches you — how to carry grief and routine in the same pair of hands.

The Daughter Saying Goodbye

Years later, in Makkah, my father became sick again. And this time, he didn’t come back.

I saw his body for the last time there — and I can still picture the peace on his face. It was so complete, so still.
And yet inside me, I was anything but.

I didn’t just see death that day. I saw the shape of absence.
The way it lingers even in the holiest of places.

The Night Shift

During one of my night shifts as a recently qualified nurse, there were three deaths in a single night.
We were short-staffed — the NHS way — and I was assigned to wash all three bodies before they were taken to the morgue.

I did it quietly, respectfully. Alone.

There’s a particular stillness in those rooms. A silence that presses against your chest.
And then there’s the part no one prepares you for: if the person’s final breath was never exhaled, it escapes when you turn their body.

That happened. And I froze. The sound — that soft, strange exhale — stayed with me. Still does.

That night, I learned that death has a presence.
And that even in the clinical, fluorescent-lit world of hospitals, there is something deeply sacred in being the last hands to touch a soul before they are returned to God.

The Auntie in Me

There’s something tender about meeting your nieces and nephews for the first time in hospital corridors — the soft blanket, the tears, the relief on the parents’ faces.
I’ve even been present for the birth of one niece, while the rest of the family waited just outside.

Watching someone take their first breath, especially when you already love them — that’s a kind of magic hospitals sometimes allow.

The Mother in Me

Each of my daughters was born within hospital walls — four unique little entries into this world. But Hibah’s birth will always have a story of its own.

She arrived so quickly, the midwives barely had time to catch her. I wasn’t even lying down yet. One minute we were rushing into the room, the next she was here — crying, perfect, ours.
That’s why we named her Hibah — a gift from Allah.
Our surprise arrival. Our “one-minute baby.”

Some births are planned. Hers was pure presence. Pure grace.

And Then There’s Me:

The girl who lost her father.
The student who stood at an empty bed.
The daughter who said goodbye in sacred soil.
The nurse who washed the dead.
The auntie who cheered through the door.
The mother who caught a gift.

Hospitals have held all these versions of me.
They’ve seen more of me than most people ever will.

Even now — as I sit in this serene, elegant hospital room, waiting, praying — nothing feels calm inside me.
Because when someone you love is behind those hospital doors, nothing else matters.

I left the wards behind when I moved to the UAE, but a part of me never really stopped being a nurse.
Not in how I sit beside the sick.
Not in how I carry stories — mine and theirs.
Not in how I hold space for beginnings and endings, over and over again.

So yes — I have a love-hate relationship with hospitals.
And maybe I always will.