When the paramedics arrived, their expressions immediately shifted from perfunctory professionalism to grave concern. They started asking questions, their voices calm yet urgent, grounding me in a reality I desperately wished to escape. I tried to answer, to articulate the inexplicable void where sensation in my legs should have been.

“Can you feel this?” one asked, pressing somewhere on my lower limb. “No,” I whispered, tears mingling with the sweat on my forehead. They exchanged looks, the kind that spoke of things left unsaid, of diagnoses too early to vocalize yet too dire to ignore.