I mended his broken heart – no metaphor, no magic

This letter, found tucked inside a medical textbook, claims a nurse revived a patient with a touch. Is it real, embellished, or something stranger?

My dear Thomas,

Thank you so much for the scarf. The wind has been particularly brutal lately.

Let me tell you about an extraordinary thing I witnessed yesterday.

I am still trembling, still alight with the urgency of it. I witnessed a man open the human heart – and close it again. The patient lived, Tom, my dear brother. He lived. And more than that, which I shall tell you later.

The surgeon was the inestimable Ludwig Ransom, a brusque fellow. When he caught me loitering in the corridor he thought I was one of his nurses and urged me to join him. Who was I to refuse?

The case was urgent. A labourer had come in with a knife wound to the chest, a wound that pulsed with every beat. I have to say, my own heart stopped seeing so much blood and I immediately jumped in with my sisters to arrest the flow with bandages and absorbent material. Still, the floor looked like a battlefield.

The patient was young and fit, barely older than you or I, but the wound was deep and probably fatal in any other circumstances than the fortuitous one that brought him to the Guardian City Free. Dr Ransom worked swiftly, exposing the torn ventricle, red and glistening like a crushed pomegranate. He placed the first suture. Then another.

I made his heart beat again

And then – just as he reached for the third – the heart stopped.

Not a flutter or stutter, Thomas, but stillness. Utter and dreadful. The theatre, once bustling with murmurs and footsteps, fell silent. I don’t think anyone breathed.

Even Ransom froze. His hand hung mid-air, needle poised.

I don’t know what moved me – no instruction was given – but I stepped forward and took a cloth to his forehead, dabbing gently, like I was soothing a child in a fever. I pressed my palm on his cheek.

And in that moment – dear brother, I swear it to you – something passed between us, the patient and I. Don’t ask me to tell you what it was. The closest approximation was a current – like static before a storm – crackled across my skin. A jolt. Tiny, but unmistakable. Not pain. More like a memory. Or recognition.

And then the heart – his heart – beat again.

Not the erratic thud of panic or the soft hiccup of resuscitation, but a steady, resolute rhythm.

Dr Ransom reeled back, suddenly returning to duty. He resumed the final suture without a word. The others looked away, too grateful or too frightened to question what had just happened.

But I know. I was the one who touched him.I mended his broken heart.

No poetry here, Thomas. No metaphor. His heart was torn, and then it was whole. And I was part of that.

I think I made him live again

But that is not the finished story, brother. The next day I went to the ward – not one I would usually visit – and I found the man, perky as he might have been had a knife not brought him close to death. I made no introduction, I was setting down my basket and he says, ‘Eliza?’

‘Yes?’

He takes my hand and says, ‘Thank you.’

I stuttered, naturally. ‘Did someone say something to you?’ I suspected my sister nurses may have seen something in the theatre although no-one but me registered the connection.

He shook his head, no. A young man, and yet so full of wisdom and certainty in that moment.

‘What do you thank me for?’ I said, in case I was mistaken.

‘My heart is alive,’ he said. ‘Thanks to you.’

When he is well, we are going to take a turn in the park.

Yours always,
Eliza

Collector’s Note:

This letter was discovered folded within a medical text — Principles of Incision — purchased from a bookshop in The Obscurity. The handwriting matches other correspondence believed to belong to “E.H.,” a nurse or attendant. Whether the events described are factual, embellished, or symbolic remains unclear. No record exists of a Dr Ludwig Ransom at the Guardian City Free, but the name appears once in a flagged registry marked “Anomalous Recoveries.” Handle with care.