There is always a cause.

From the moment I got the call, every instinct three decades in a trauma bay had built in me stood up at once and said, in a voice I could not quiet: this is wrong.

People imagine a nurse’s instinct as something mystical, a sixth sense, and it isn’t.

It is pattern.

Thirty years of watching how bodies actually fail teaches you the shape of the real thing, and — just as important — the shape of the lie.

Real sudden cardiac death in a young woman has a story around it, always: a missed congenital thing, a family history, a hidden condition, a set of symptoms that everyone overlooked in hindsight.