After her surgery and PT, things were quiet – there was less traffic at her front door. The day I matched into residency, she slid a congratulatory message under my door. I was hosting a party for my classmates. I opened the note and read it, holding her note in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other.

“Dear Dr. Jeremy, Congratulations on finishing medical school. If it had not been for you, I don’t know if I would be alive.”

Months went by. Her cane disappeared and her walking improved. Then, delivery men began to reappear. I’d hear a knock at her door while I was eating after a shift. I’d peer through my New York City apartment peephole to see what was going on. I couldn’t ever quite make out what was in those delivery bags.

“Maybe it’s Thai food,” I thought.

Then, when I got home on Sept. 22, 2013, I saw that NYPD green sign taped onto her door, near where Natalie’s watercolors once hung. The sign mentioned an order pursuant to an obscure NYPD code. I Googled it.

All that came up was comments from a sleepy old online discussion forum with some chatter between a few faceless netizens talking about mysterious green signs on their neighbors’ doors. They were discussing their neighbors who had died in their homes. I got a pit in my stomach. I went downstairs to speak to the doorman.

“What happened to Linda?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “When I came on to my shift, the super told me the police removed her body today. She’d been drinking again.”

I have still never saved an alcoholic. But I’ve resumed printing out those detox program referral forms, though, and I counsel my alcoholic patients. I never asked Linda the CAGE questions; Now all that is left behind is a green NYPD sign and a Wifi network called “Natalie.”

Dr. Jeremy Samuel Faust is an EM resident at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and Elmhurst in Queens. He tweets about #FOAMed and classical music @jeremyfaust.