His body was pushed into this state.
Someone gave him something he should never have been given, and it nearly killed him.” I did not name it.
I did not have to, and I would not, standing in a public corridor — the how of it belonged in a sealed toxicology report and a courtroom, not in the air of my emergency department.
What mattered clinically was already done: we knew it was a poisoning and not a surgery, and that knowledge was the difference between the treatment that would save him and the operating room that might have finished him.
I chose those words with care, and the choosing of them mattered as much as the diagnosis.
There is a discipline in my profession about how you speak of these things, and it is not squeamishness.