But I do not panic at a lab panel.
A lab panel is the closest thing my profession has to a language, and I have been fluent in it for fifteen years.
Where the others saw a wall of frightening figures, I saw sentences, and the sentences did not say what the note clipped to the front of the consent form claimed they said.
The story on the front page was a heart in crisis, a chest that needed opening, minutes that mattered.
The story in the numbers underneath was something else entirely — a body whose internal chemistry had been driven, hard and fast, into a state that healthy bodies do not simply fall into on their own at three in the morning.
The two stories did not match.