The fluorescent lights in Room 314 hummed the same tune they’d been playing for eighteen hours. Eighteen hours of watching my oxygen levels drop, watching my blood pressure spike, watching machines beep warnings that everyone seemed determined to ignore.

Everyone except the nurses, bless them, who kept checking on me every few minutes with increasingly worried expressions.

My mother, Patricia Thornfield, sat in the corner chair, scrolling through her phone, occasionally sighing loud enough to let everyone know she was “inconvenienced.” My father, Richard Thornfield, paced by the window, checking his watch every thirty seconds like he had somewhere more important to be. My sister, Delphine, had claimed the comfortable reclining chair and was live-tweeting her “dramatic hospital vigil” to her 12,000 followers.

I’d been rushed to Mercy General Hospital in Willowbrook Heights at 2:00 a.m. with what the paramedics suspected was a severe allergic reaction. But as the hours crawled by, it became clear this wasn’t just hives or difficulty breathing. My throat was closing, my airways were swelling, and my heart was working overtime to pump blood through a system that was essentially shutting down.

Dr. Amelia Cross, the attending physician, had explained it to my family in terms so simple a fifth grader could understand. “Celeste is having a severe anaphylactic reaction to something. We’ve administered epinephrine, but her body isn’t responding the way we’d hoped. We need to keep her under observation and potentially move to more intensive interventions.”