Twelve days is a strange unit of time. It’s short enough for you to tell yourself you’ll get through it somehow, and long enough that halfway through you catch yourself thinking you no longer quite remember what life looked like before.

For twelve days I was occupied with what is politely called “taking care of loved ones.” In reality, it’s a sequence of small, seemingly insignificant tasks which, when combined correctly, are perfectly capable of filling an entire day, the whole evening, and part of the night—while leaving you with the peculiar feeling that you were constantly busy and yet accomplished absolutely nothing.

Exactly twelve days ago, Quentin stopped being ill. He finished his antibiotics and probiotics, started hearing again, and stopped coughing. A space opened up in my schedule, which was immediately filled by Bob.

Bob is a hypochondriac. All it takes is a newspaper article, an online discussion, or a mild twinge anywhere between the ankle and the crown of his head, and he knows exactly what’s wrong with him. At the same time, he despises blood, needles, and even just mildly invasive medical procedures. He has every illness imaginable, as long as it remains theoretical and suitable for discussion over dinner. The moment a needle is involved, the illness disappears.

Then came a gallbladder attack that had the audacity to be real. So unpleasantly real that it forced Bob to call an ambulance. At that point, he was compelled to accept defeat, schedule surgery, and—within the framework of his newly acquired courage—decided to deal with his hernia as well.

I remember clearly how he found out about the hernia. We were still living in Prague, and I accompanied him to the doctor. She told him he had an umbilical hernia and that surgery would be advisable. Bob received this information with the calm of a man who has just learned that there is an island somewhere in the Pacific that he has no intention of ever visiting. He treated the recommendation as purely academic.

Only when the gallbladder forced him to plan surgery did he conclude that, since he’d already be there, it would be sensible to have the hernia fixed too. Not because it hurt, or because the two things were related in any way. Bob simply likes doing things in bulk and efficiently. I am convinced that if he were ever told he needed a tooth pulled, he would have all of them removed at once just to never have to deal with it again.

And so it happened that while Quentin recovered, Bob became bedridden. He’s the kind of person who won’t ask for help. But if you ignore him long enough, you’ll eventually find him lying motionless—but very calmly and quietly—on the floor, staring at the ceiling and waiting for the situation either to improve or to end altogether.

In truth, there isn’t all that much I have to do around him. I cook, give blood-thinning injections, and change bandages. I take care of the dog and work overtime as well, since I myself spent the beginning of the year ill. Although my company doesn’t particularly mind that I worked fewer hours, my bank account holds a very conservative view on such disruptions. I’d also like to travel in the summer, fill the pool, and pay the gardeners—who charge each visit as if they weren’t maintaining an ordinary garden, but restoring a botanical garden after the apocalypse, or at the very least after a barbarian invasion.

Strictly speaking, none of this is enough to cost me sleep. But my own interests were pushed aside in a subtler, less visible way. I can’t concentrate. I have one unpleasant character flaw: I take care of people around me even when there’s no good reason to do so. If anyone in my vicinity is ill, I remain in a permanent state of readiness—like a night receptionist at a hotel where nothing is happening, but at any moment someone might appear with a question, a request, or a look suggesting impending trouble.

I realized this a few days ago when Bob’s friends were teasing him that after gallbladder surgery he would have to eat only salads and other bland, lightweight food. Bob smiled and replied that he’d been eating tomato sauce and bread pudding all week—his two favorite meals—and that I had also discovered plenty of cookies he could have. He framed it as if I enjoyed searching for various vegan foods, and therefore naturally enjoyed searching for foods suitable after gallbladder surgery as well.

That honestly shocked me. Do people really think I enjoy this?

I would quite like to go to the store like a normal person and simply buy the same wafer I’ve been buying for years, without having to examine the ingredient list to see whether the manufacturer has changed the recipe again and added whey or some similarly unnecessary substance. Who would enjoy spending twice as long in a grocery store just reading the detailed composition of every single product and then looking up the origin of all those mysterious E-numbers online?

Lately, I find myself daydreaming in the store about what it must be like to shop like Mith: “I literally only drink water and consume whole foods with straight-out-of-nature ingredients that I can identify and pronounce.” But that would require planning meals and having the ability to predict what I’ll want to eat three days from now. So instead, I sigh and google another E-number on my phone, while people around me toss items into their carts with the carefree ease of children at a playground.

What troubles me more, though, is where this need to take care of others even comes from. Why do I shop for people without being asked? Why, when someone has a problem, do they not even need to ask before I go and solve it? In my article 72 Hours, I complained that people constantly want something from me. In When You Can, You Must, I complained about essentially the same thing—just at greater length. And yet, in the middle of writing this very article, a colleague mentioned in the company chat that he couldn’t solve a bug. I immediately dropped everything else and devoted my full attention to the problem until it was resolved. Not the colleague—he stayed—but the bug.

Perhaps I simply need the world around me to function. Is it normal to have such a compulsive need to act in the interest of others, at one’s own expense, and be irritated by it at the same time?

I read that in a certain species of ants, nearly half the ants in the colony do nothing and form a so-called labor reserve. Are we like ants, with everyone around me serving as a labor reserve? And if someone in my vicinity suddenly became a productive member of society, would that reduce my urge?

I’m afraid we’ll never find out.