Life on Alarm Mode by Mohsen Abdollahi

Life on Alarm Mode

a poem by Mohsen Abdollahi

I am alive.
But my life is not in normal mode.

My life
is in alarm mode.
Not once.
Not occasionally.
Always.

The LVAD was meant to restore blood flow.
And it did.
It was meant to buy time.
And it did.

But no one explains how heavy that time becomes
when every second of it
is lived beside an alarm.

In medical papers, they write:
“Stable device.”
“Normal parameters.”
“Adequate flow.”

But no paper ever describes
the night you wake up afraid the sound has stopped,
or the morning when — before opening your eyes —
you listen.

Not for birds.
Not for the city.
But for the hum of a machine
that silently decides
whether today you live
or you don’t.

The alarms come.
They fade.
They return.

And every time,
something inside you fractures —
something no surgery can repair.

They say:
“Everything is under control.”

But a human mind
that is permanently prepared for death
is never under control.

I am not a medical case.
I am not a file number.
I am a human being
who has learned how to coexist with fear.

In my country, LVAD patients are not supposed to know one another.
We are not officially introduced.
We are not encouraged to connect.

But pain does not respect regulations.

I found them in hospital corridors.
In exhausted eyes.
In bodies with cables emerging —
after the heart itself has already been removed from the center of life.

We became a group of around ten.
Not through formal channels,
but through recognition that only shared suffering creates.

We spoke about alarms.
About institutional silence.
About nights when sleep feels dangerous.

This is not just a patient group.
It is a quiet act of resistance.
A living testimony from patients the system prefers to keep isolated.

We chose not to remain silent.

Not to attack.
Not to accuse.
But to tell the truth.

Because science, when it forgets the human being,
does not save lives —
it only prolongs survival.

And life
is more than surviving.