I have spent ten years in the worst rooms in the hospital, the rooms where the bleeding is arterial and the family is screaming and everyone else has frozen.

And I have learned that in those rooms, the person who saves the patient is not the one who feels the most.

It is the one who feels nothing, on purpose, for as long as it takes — who looks at the catastrophe and does not flinch, who assesses the damage while everyone else panics, who finds the source of the bleeding and stops it, and who cuts away the dead and ruined tissue, cleanly, before the infection can spread to what is still healthy and alive.

Blake and Danielle thought my work had made me fragile.