"Am I going to die tonight?"

Great story.

The man on the ventilator asked the doctor for a pen and a piece of paper. He wrote, in shaky handwriting from his hospital bed, what he could not say with the tube jammed down his throat because of the coronavirus.

"Am I going to die tonight?"

Dr. Rick Pitera, 53, felt his stomach drop as he read the note. He knew the odds, and he knew they were not good. He already had seen so much death and suffering at St. Barnabas Medical Center from COVID-19, more than he had seen in the previous three decades working at the Livingston hospital as an anesthesiologist.