It was a wound.

And you do not force a wound.

That was the single most useful thing my three unfinished semesters of nursing school ever gave me, and I am grateful I learned it before I met Edith, because everyone else at Oakridge had gotten it exactly backwards.

The whole staff approached her back as a compliance problem — a task she was refusing, an item on a care plan that wasn’t getting done, a stubbornness to be managed or worked around or, on the bad days, argued with.

And approaching it that way, they made it worse every single time, because a frightened person who feels a hand reaching for the thing they’re most afraid of does not calm down; they escalate, and then they get labeled difficult, and the label becomes its own justification for pushing harder next time.