NeuroDivine

Third session of the week. I’m in the quiet room off the main unit—less bustle, more calm. The hum of machines is softened here, and the rhythm is gentler. Yet I notice the absence too: the cohort’s shared glances, the murmured check-ins, the small rituals of presence. I am apart, not alone.

The nursing staff support me as a shared-care patient. Their trust in my rhythm is a quiet affirmation. But it is not just my rhythm that matters here. It is ours.

This centre, officially opened four years ago, has likely stood for six. And I have now received more of my dialysis here than anywhere else. That realisation settles like a psalm refrain—familiar, surprising, true.

And I am not the only one stitched into this place. We all are. Each patient in the cohort carries their own thread—some bright, some frayed, some quietly strong. We have waited together, endured together, laughed and grumbled and blessed each other in passing. We have become a tapestry of compromise and courage.

There is something Benedictine in this: the slow accumulation of presence, the anchoring of place through repetition and care. This centre is not just a building. It is a monastery of machines, a chapel of compromise. And we, the cohort, are its community—bound not by vows, but by vessels and vigilance.

As an autistic Anglican, I notice the patterns others might miss. The way the light shifts across the floor at 3pm. The way the nurses remember our preferences without needing to ask. The way silence in this side room is not empty, but full—of breath, of grace, of the quiet miracle of being kept going.

Thanks be to God for the rhythm, the room, and the remembering. For the cohort, the care, and the courage. For the grace of being stitched in—not alone, but together.