Vitals & Vows

Every story starts with a heartbeat.

For me, Vitals & Vows began with one question that wouldn’t leave me alone:

What happens when love meets the limits of the human body?

I’ve spent a lot of time in dialysis centers — as a patient, a witness, and a storyteller. When you’re tethered to a machine three times a week, you notice everything: the rhythm of the pumps, the quiet courage of the nurses, the small talk that turns into friendship. You start to see that the clinic isn’t just a medical space — it’s its own living ecosystem, full of stories about endurance, compassion, and connection.

💉 The Real-Life Spark

One day, I met a couple who both worked in dialysis. They were married — something you don’t see every day in that setting. Usually, staff rotate centers or cover different shifts to keep professional and personal life separate.

But one week, her husband happened to cover a shift at her center while she was out of town. The way the other staff talked about it — half teasing, half admiring — stuck with me. It made me wonder:

What is it like to love someone whose job is to keep people alive?

What happens when your professional care and your personal heart overlap?

That couple was the spark. They’re nothing like the characters in Vitals & Vows — but they opened the door to imagining what love might look like when it’s lived under fluorescent lights, between blood pressure checks and IV alarms.

💔 Writing Through Illness

When I started drafting the story, I was in the middle of my own fight — living with end-stage renal disease, managing dialysis, and navigating recovery from a stroke. Writing became my way of reclaiming agency.

Every session felt like a kind of vow:

to keep showing up for my body,

to keep showing up for my art,

to keep believing there was beauty still left in the mess.

There were days I typed with trembling hands, or wrote scenes in my head while hooked up to the machine. But that’s the thing about writing through illness — it teaches you to listen differently. You learn to notice the details that healthy people rush past: the sound of saline running through a line, the nurse’s laughter echoing down the hall, the sacred quiet after a patient’s sigh of relief.

Those moments became the emotional texture of the book.

🩷 Balancing Real Life and Storytelling

People sometimes ask me how I balance writing with dialysis, recovery, and daily life. The truth? I don’t always. Some weeks, balance is a fantasy. But I’ve learned that creativity doesn’t require perfect conditions — it just needs presence.

On good days, I write because I can.

On hard days, I write because I must.

Writing Vitals & Vows helped me rediscover the parts of myself that illness tried to silence — the dreamer, the romantic, the observer. The writer who still believes in love stories, even the complicated ones.

💫 What I Hope Readers Take Away

At its core, Vitals & Vows isn’t just about dialysis or illness — it’s about resilience and the human capacity to love through pain.

It’s about the vows we keep when no one’s watching.

The ones whispered between heartbeats:

I’ll stay. I’ll hope. I’ll keep going.

I hope readers come away feeling seen — especially those who’ve lived through medical systems, caregiving, or chronic conditions. I hope they find themselves in the small, quiet acts of tenderness that hold the story together.

And above all, I hope it reminds them that even in sterile spaces, humanity thrives.

That love can exist anywhere — even where we least expect it.

Vitals & Vows is available now on Amazon.

It’s a story for anyone who’s ever loved through the chaos, stayed through the hard parts, or found beauty inside a body that’s still learning how to heal.

Because sometimes, the greatest vows aren’t spoken at an altar —

they’re made in a dialysis chair.

💫

— Jocelyn Paige Kelly