They had thought things like that about me for six years.
None of them knew that what I was actually doing, in the silence with the pen in my hand, was reading.
Chapter 3 — Don’t Sign Yet
I set the pen down on the nurses’ counter and picked up the clipboard instead, and I read the preliminary labs the way I had read ten thousand of them.
To everyone in that hallway, the numbers on that page were noise — meaningless columns that only made the emergency feel more urgent, more beyond them, more reason to sign whatever was put in front of them and let the important men in scrubs take over.
That is exactly how panic is meant to work, and it is exactly how consent gets extracted from frightened families in the middle of the night.