Todd Brison

Most people think leaving is failure. I used to believe that too. Right up until the night a twenty-three-year-old walked into my ER, and I realized I could no longer be a part of what I was watching. The previously healthy young woman came in unable to speak clearly, with sudden weakness on one side of her body. Textbook stroke - but obviously it had to be something else, because she was twenty-three. Advanced imaging showed multiple small strokes. Some fresh. Some hours old, maybe days. Nothing in her history explained it - except one thing. A pharmaceutical product her university had mandated before she could start the semester. One week earlier. I could diagnose her. Stabilize her. Get neurology involved. But none of that would touch why it was allowed to happen in the first place. I couldn't even document it properly. No diagnostic code existed for what I was looking at. She wouldn't become a statistic. There would be no accountability. It was almost as if it never happened at all. That's how it works. We don't just harm people. We make the harm invisible. A few months later, I left. Not because I stopped caring. Because I finally understood that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is loudly refuse to participate in the dysfunction. I'm not the only one who's come to that conclusion. I wrote about what that costs - and what we owe the people willing to pay it. @RWMaloneMD