“It’s 200 over 120.”

“Are you sure? Check again.”

“Sure, Doc.” Five minutes passed. Then he said, “Beta… you have kidney failure.”

“You’re a doctor, right?”, my primary care doctor asked me,His voice kept going, but my brain stopped comprehending. Everything turned into blankness. My heart was pounding. My vision felt bright, washed out. I could see his lips moving, but nothing registered. It felt like a flickering light off, on, off until suddenly my thoughts flooded back all at once. How is that even possible? I’m a doctor myself how can I have renal failure? What about my USMLE? This doctor must be wrong. I need a smoke break. Is this the end? Somewhere in my head, the “this is the end” meme song started playing, absurd and cruel at the same time.

I sat there on the examination table, frozen. “Beta, take this and go to the emergency department. You are in a hypertensive crisis. Can you drive?” The next thing I remember, I was on the freeway, heading toward Loma Linda Hospital, gripping the steering wheel like it was the last normal thing left in my life.

Then I was on a bed. IV drips in both arms. Chest leads being placed. Monitors beeping. People from my own fraternity doctors, nurses moving around me with practiced urgency. But this time, I wasn’t one of them. I was the patient. I hated the yellow socks.

Hope I made that dramatic enough.

I had only one question: Why me? God, why me? Please wake me up from this dream. I still had to get into surgery residency. I still had to go back to work. I still had reports pending. I closed my eyes.

I was scared to die with thousands of thoughts going through my mind like flickering light I had only one question: Why me? God, why me?

Wake me up from this dream. I still had to get into a surgery residency. I still had to go to work. I still had reports pending. I closed my eyes, half-expecting the universe to reset.

Six months later, I’m writing this from my desk. I’m on dialysis. I’m preparing for a renal transplant. Life, oddly, looks normal from the outside. If you know me personally and worry about me, let me say this gently: I’m okay. Truly. You can reach out, you can talk to me but don’t wrap me in fragile sympathy. This isn’t tragedy. It’s a detour.

Back in that hospital bed, when the machines became my background music, something else started breaking: my old way of seeing life. I didn’t feel panic. I felt clarity. You begin questioning everything when your body fails in a way your mind cannot negotiate with.

The first question was God.

Not in anger but in curiosity. If God exists, could He make me whole again? Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. Physically. Could He return my kidneys to the way they were when I was born?

The answer was no.

What is keeping me alive right now is not divine intervention. It is dialysis machines, nephrologists, transplant surgeons, immunology, pharmacology medical science quietly defying entropy. If there is a God, He is not the one filtering my blood at 4 a.m.

And if there is no God, then the universe is exactly what it looks like: indifferent, mathematical, beautiful, and cruel in equal measure.

That’s when a strange realization arrived:

Nothing really matters.

Not in a nihilistic, depressed way but in a liberating one.

The bed. The room. My parents. My friends. Love. A girlfriend. A crush. Money. A surgery residency. My ambition. Even God. When you come face-to-face with your own fragility, all the hierarchies collapse. Everything becomes equally small. Equally temporary.

I lost my fear of death somewhere in that hospital. Not because I wanted to die but because death stopped feeling like a threat. I’m not grieving. I’m not broken. I’m simply… detached. As if I stepped one layer outside the game and now I’m watching it play.

If there is a God, what more could He do to me?

And if there isn’t, then there was never anyone to fear.

So I move through this world now like a quiet machine still loving, still dreaming, still working but no longer owned by outcomes. I operate, I plan, I hope… without believing that any of it is guaranteed or even owed.

Maybe this is what freedom looks like. Now I am not scared to die because When nothing matters, everything becomes lighter.