It is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, unheralded and unpreventable.

There is nothing anywhere in this record — nothing in the notes, nothing in the pathology — that indicates any behavior of yours contributed to it.

“And the hysterectomy was not a choice anybody made lightly at four in the morning.

You were bleeding at a rate that had already put four units into you.

It was that or you.”

I sat there.

“My mother-in-law,” I said, and then I had to stop and start again.