He ended the video by holding up a needle driver and a piece of suture. He took a single stitch into a piece of leather. "I'm starting over," he said. "One stitch at a time."

Aris did improvise. He used veterinary tubing from a closed zoo’s donation. It worked for thirty minutes. Then it kinked.

He went home, poured a glass of whiskey, and for the first time in twenty years, he didn’t answer his page when the next code blue went out. For three months, Aris became a ghost. He went to work, did the minimum, and went home. He stopped speaking to his nurses. He stopped calling his wife during breaks. He stopped caring if the sutures were perfectly straight.

His name was Mr. Hendricks, a father of three, intubated and fighting. The ventilator alarm screamed, but the hospital had run out of the specific circuit tubing hours ago. Aris had called Supply. He had called the Chief. He had even called a rival hospital two states over. The answer was the same: On backorder. Improvise.