Louisa Jones was in her forties and worked long hours as CEO head of a hospital in Atlanta City. One night, she called down to the nurses' station for a night nurse to bring her up a couple of aspirin for a headache from her office. The nurse came ten minutes later with the pills and then left. Louisa took the pills with some water and then carried on working at her computer desk. Twenty minutes passed, and Louisa was beg...

I was sure it was just indigestion but the pain in my chest and the sudden eruption of an epic sweat made my colleagues ring an ambulance. The paramedics were there quickly and were sufficiently worried to take me into A&E. Once there I was wheeled into a side room and one of the doctors came to see me. Embarrassingly it turned out to be Jill, a young doctor I saw occasionally at parkrun. She ran with a group of medics th...

I was sitting behind my desk, leaning back in my chair with my feet up on the edge, being careful not to scratch the woodwork. It was a failing of mine, but I liked it because it relaxed me. I took a deep draw on my cigar and puffed the smoke out in a long narrow stream. I shook my head. It was another failing of mine, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop myself from indulging. I was equally weak when it came t...

It wouldn’t be long now. She knew. She made sure to sit up as much as she could. She tried so, so hard to walk and, with a stick, could make it to the nurse’s station. But, sometimes, she could not even eat solid food and had to be fed on a drip. Two years of sickness had left Ester little more than a bag of skin and bones. When she was first diagnosed, she’d dreamed of what might have been. Of passionate love affairs on...

Sometimes a fraction of a second is enough to ruin someone's life. Jim found out about it the hard way when, as a result of a stupid accident on a motorcycle, he broke his leg in several places and faced a long hospitalization. He was supposed to regain full fitness, but no one would give him back the time he lost. The stay in the hospital mainly consisted of long bed rest with an immobilized leg and difficult rehabilitat...