The ventilator sounded like a pinball machine.

It was an odd sound, really, to hear in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit. The sudden-ness of it startled me from my semi-conscious state. I had been curled up in a guest chair in the corner of the room holding on to last week’s copy of People magazine.

“Hey Danny,” I had said earlier, “do you want to hear about Taylor Swift or Jennifer Aniston?” My hope was that if I annoyed him enough, he would wake up and tell me to stop.

I got up and poked my head into the hall to see Christine, Danny’s night nurse, charting at the computer.

“That machine,” I groggily said, “is going off again.” I had asked her about it earlier.  It was a funny sound. It made me think that maybe it sounded that way so visitors didn’t immediately panic, thinking something had gone awry. But any sound coming from the machines hooked up to my comatose cousin jolted what was left of my nerves.

Christine followed me back in, telling me, once again, that the noise meant he needed to be suctioned, not that he was crashing like I pessimistically thought.

I resumed my position in the chair next to Danny’s bed and looked up at the clock. It was 2:30am. The SICU was the last place I ever expected to be at this hour on a Friday night.

I sighed and let the time sink in before I closed my eyes again. At this time, just one week earlier, the accident had already happened. I hadn’t known yet. I was sleeping, completely unaware that my dad was about to answer a phone call that would change everything.

On April 19, 2014, my older cousin was critically injured when a drunk driver drove into the back of his police vehicle. He suffered several life-threatening injuries including a traumatic brain injury, multiple skull fractures, a collapsed lung, two broken vertebrae, and broken ribs.

The doctors didn’t know if he would live through the first 24 hours. In fact, he wasn’t supposed to. But despite the severity of his injuries, despite the warnings that a happy ending might not be ahead, despite the doctors’ prognosis that in order to survive he needed “a miracle and a lot of luck,” he pulled through.

At the time, we all thought that if we could just get through that first day we might be in the clear. We had no idea what the journey that lay ahead was going to entail.

Over the next 47 days that my cousin spent in the SICU, my family gathered there every day. It seems surreal, when I think about it now, the routine that we all had adopted. After the initial shock of the accident when many of us had to go back to work, we would still all gather in the hospital waiting room in the evenings and on the weekends. It started to feel like a haven to me. It was the one place where I could go where I knew everyone felt as crappy as I did.

During this time, I was able to tether together the medical lingo I overheard. I spent night after sleepless night up in bed, Googling every word so that I could understand what was happening to him. I read scholarly article after scholarly article on traumatic brain injuries as fiercely as I have read New York Times best-selling novels. I had discovered this unquenchable thirst for knowledge that I hadn’t known was lying dormant inside of me.

Then one day, when I walked into Danny’s room, those numbers and lines on his monitor weren’t just numbers and lines anymore. I saw that his blood pressure was still too high without having to ask his nurse. I knew that his intracranial pressure was also incredibly too high, and moreover, I understood what intracranial pressure was. I was learning. That thirst was awakened now, and inside of me I could feel it screaming more, more, more.

Meanwhile, Danny had become famous. His picture kept gracing the covers of local newspapers and morning news shows, encouraging Facebook statuses and Instagram posts. But to me, he was still just the person I called the night before my high school graduation because I had gotten into a fight with my boyfriend. He was the one who wouldn’t let me drive to our grandmother’s wake when I had just gotten my driver’s permit weeks before because he (half-jokingly) said that one death in the family at the moment was enough. He was the person who mocked the way I held my knife and fork during every single meal we ate together because, according to him, I looked like a Neanderthal. He was the person who teased and antagonized me at any opportunity and I loved him for it.

He wasn’t just this famous cop who was battling for his life. He was my family. And to his SICU nurses, he was a father, a husband, a son, a brother, a nephew, an uncle, a cousin, and a friend. They saw the person he was beyond what the news had said about him because they listened to the stories we told about him. They held our hands while we cried. They hugged us when we arrived and left. They had therapy sessions with us when we were running out of hope. They became our family, too.

Though I hadn’t mentioned it right away, it was early after the accident that I had figured out what I wanted to do with my life. I want to take care of two kinds of people: those who are sick and injured, as well as their families – not because Danny survived, but because so many people don’t.

I used to live my life by the saying, “everything happens for a reason.” I still try to. Some days are harder than others. It’s hard to believe there’s a purpose when bad things happen to good people and the worst people in the world often float through unscathed.

It bothers me. It hurts my heart and soul in a way I didn’t know was possible. But I found the way to get through it.

I want to help save those that I can, and do everything possible to try and save those who cannot. I want to give hugs to grieving and mourning families. I want to tell them jokes to help them through the day. I want to hold patients’ hands as they go through the worst times of their lives.

And that’s why this entire experience has led me to devote my life to care for others as a nurse.