It is strange, the thing that steadied me in that hospital bed.

It was not rage, though rage would come later.

It was not even fear, though I had plenty of reason for it.

It was, of all things, my training.

I had spent my adult life in careers that ran on documentation, on records, on the patient assembly of facts that could withstand scrutiny, and lying there, I found myself thinking not like a victim but like an investigator, cataloguing what I knew, what could be proven, what the evidence would show.

My parents had counted on my being too broken to fight.