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From The New York Times and WBUR Boston, this is Modern Love.

Stories of Love, loss and redemption.

I'm your host, Megna Chakrabardi.

The Hospital Pediatrics Wing is a place of pain and resilience, fear and healing.

Normally, families are there for purely medical reasons, but for Thomas Hoeven, the hospital became a space for a different kind of recovery.

Jake Gyllenhaal stars in the new movie Stronger and he reads Tom's essay, Nursing a Wound in an Appropriate Setting.

I started my Pediatrics residency on the Cardiology Unit, which was appropriate.

My heart had a giant hole in it.

Just after I graduated from medical school, as I was moving into my fiance's New York apartment, she ended our relationship.

We went out to dinner that night and after we came home, she told me we were through.

She and I had been together 12 years, engaged for two.

We had a wedding plan for three weeks later.

I can't believe you're doing this.

I said from the edge of her bed,

I know will always be best friends, she said.

I left just after sunrise, suitcase in hand, feeling as if I had just fallen from a moving train.

It seemed unimaginable that I was meant to report for duty at the hospital in less than a month.

My new employers were expecting a freshly minted physician, full of knowledge and an eagerness to heal.

As it was, I could barely remember my name.

I took a cab to the airport, booked a flight to my father's house in Minnesota and stayed there until it was time to limp back to New York to start my residency.

I spent the hour that was supposed to have been our wedding ceremony sitting in the crook of a tree, staring at the suburban horizon.

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