“I thought I had more time.”

It’s the most common sentence spoken at 3:00 AM in a hospital room—not with drama, but with quiet disbelief. People realize the timeline they were negotiating with was never elastic.

As an internal medicine night-shift physician, Dr. Ril Adekiigbe has spent years in the fluorescent silence of what he calls the Night Vigil. After the noise of the day fades, patients stop performing. They stop bargaining. They stop explaining. And they begin naming what actually mattered.

What Patients Say When Time Is Short is not a medical manual. It’s not self-help. It’s not a collection of dramatic confessions. It’s a record of patterns—the same sentences spoken by different people, from different lives, at the same moment of reckoning.

You won’t find diagnoses or clinical theories here. Instead, you’ll meet the “3:00 AM Truth”: the regrets that surface when the illusions of work, money, endurance, and “later” finally collapse.

Inside, you’ll discover why “later” is a dangerous strategy; why the rat race has no real winner; why presence is the only currency that scales; how vigilance can become self-erasure for caregivers and high-responsibility professionals; and why “normal” labs can still mask quiet decline.

“I didn’t write this as a physician trying to explain medicine,” Dr. Adekiigbe says. “I wrote it as a witness to what people say when explanations stop mattering.”

This is not a book about death. It’s a book about timing—about how regret is rarely dramatic, but often predictable, and how that predictability is an opportunity you still have.

A mirror for the living, offered by those who no longer have the luxury of self-deception.

Don’t wait until three in the morning to hear what they learned too late.