“Are you OK?” asked the nurse, as machines hummed and lights glared. The patient, yellow-tinged, weary, lay silent while the world hurried around her — fluids, paracetamol, antibiotics, needles and scans, the mystery of illness written in her blood. And what of her husband? Inside: fear, exhaustion, despair. Outside: armour of calm, the warrior, the rock at her bedside. Is he OK? She is not ordinary — if such a word belongs to anyone. Her body a puzzle of conditions that weave together into fragility, into fight. Is she OK? Days blur into nights. Corridors become home, moved from ward to ward, sleep fractured by monitors’ beeps, by rubies of…