The Night I Borrowed Energy
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
There’s nothing like finishing a blood transfusion at 3 a.m. and then realizing you’re suddenly more awake than a toddler on a sugar rush. One minute I was half-dead with anemia, the next I was lying in bed thinking, So this is what borrowed energy feels like. Honestly, I felt a bit like Iron Man after someone plugged in a fresh arc reactor. Except instead of a glowing chest plate, I had two bags of donor blood fueling me from the inside.
Was it the transfusion doing its magic, or just the fact that I had already slept half the day before? Who knows. What I do know is that from 3 a.m. to 9 a.m., I was wide awake, alert, and nowhere near sleepy. Imagine me, a night owl in a hospital gown, buzzing with energy while the rest of the ward was in dreamland.
Today also happens to mark a small but meaningful monthversary: one full month since I went on a social media hiatus and uninstalled Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok from my phone. I still have zero appetite to return. Just the thought of doomscrolling again makes my stomach churn. I love my brain so much and I don't want to let it brainrot in endless feeds. Instead, I’ve found joy in living without the noise. No algorithm tugging at my attention, no mindless scrolling to numb the hours. When I want to share, I simply use Meta Business Suite to broadcast my blog posts or drop a Shopee affiliate link on stories. It feels like reclaiming mental space I didn’t realize I had been missing.
So what does one do during an unexpected six-hour night shift? In my case: a little bit of everything and nothing. I finished some summaries of books on the Headway app, half-digesting wisdom in bite-sized chunks. I took random photos of the room, the kind that will never win awards but might just become useful later (yes, I admit, some of them might sneak into my Shopee affiliate attempts, don’t judge). I even ordered vegetables for my mom and my kids using the Titipku app, because why not use your newfound vampire blood energy for grocery logistics? And of course, I tried to capture the sunrise. Except the sun didn’t show up. The sky was all gray and gloomy, as if it, too, hadn’t gotten the memo that I was now bursting with borrowed vitality.
Breakfast eventually arrived, which I greeted like a long-awaited date. Soto daging with perkedel and a glass of watermelon juice; pure joy in a tray. Later for lunch, it was salmon teriyaki with potatoes, baby corn, and clear soup. Hospital food often gets a bad reputation, but honestly, the meals here have been surprisingly good.
But the real good news came with my morning blood test results. My hemoglobin, which had plunged dangerously low to 8.7 yesterday, had risen to 11.2. My leukocytes, which had spiked to 13.86, had normalized to a healthy 6.71. No wonder I felt so alive. I wasn’t imagining it, but my body was actually bouncing back.
Still, despite the numbers looking brighter, the day ended without a single visit from my main doctor. I waited. And waited. By midnight, still no sign of him. Which could only mean one thing: no discharge today. Another night in this hospital bed.
At first, I felt the tiniest pang of disappointment. But as I settled into the sheets again, I realized something: this is what recovery looks like. Sometimes it’s just another day of waiting, another day of small routines, another day of learning patience.
And maybe that’s the hidden curriculum of hospital life: patience. Waiting for the doctor. Waiting for the lab results. Waiting for your body to slowly, quietly knit itself back together. For someone who wants things meaningful, purposeful, and ideally moving forward, this waiting feels like a paradox. But perhaps there’s meaning here too.
As I lay in the dimly lit room, I remembered a line from Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.” Today, my “space” was filled with waiting, with nothing seemingly happening. But I could choose to stew in frustration or to see it as borrowed time. A pause. A stretch of grace where my only job was to rest, heal, and let others take care of me.
It’s funny how easy it is to overlook the small, ordinary joys in the middle of all this. A hot bowl of soup. An app that sends groceries across the city. A silly photo snapped at dawn. Even the gray sky that refused to give me a proper sunrise. It became a reminder that life doesn’t always hand us what we expect, but it still gives us enough to notice.
Healing, in any form, is never instant. It’s stitched together from nights of wakefulness, trays of food, boring lab numbers, and endless waiting. But it’s in those ordinary pieces that resilience is quietly built.
If you’re in a season of waiting (whether for health, clarity, or just the next chapter), don’t despise the slowness. Look around. Notice the small mercies. Maybe write them down. Borrow patience the way I borrowed blood last night. Because energy fades, patience wavers, but gratitude has a way of multiplying whatever little strength we have.
