Tonight, she is probably sleeping peacefully in her bed. Tomorrow, when she comes into work, her world will be turned upside down. She will find out that she has caused someone to die. Her blood will run cold. Sleep, and peace, will evaporate into thin air.

Everybody kills someone. Eventually. Or so they tell me. It sounds so ghastly. So cold. So matter-of-fact. When they first told me that, it was over a glass of beer. In a bar. After work. It didnt sound so bad then. Compared to the hundreds whose lives you save, a few deaths are to be expected, is what I thought then.

But not tonight. Tonight, the cost of that one life that is slowly slipping away is just too great. It was an innocent mistake on her part. Anybody could have made it. Perhaps it wasnt innocent. Perhaps it was a careless mistake. I dont know. But here I am, at 2 AM, dealing with the aftermath of the mistake. Telling the patient’s daughter that her mother has hours left to live. And there is nothing we are going to do about it. Its the kind thing to do, I tell the daughter. And I find myself choosing my words carefully to try and hide (?) the mistake that has been made. I like to think it is because I want to spare the daughter the trauma of knowing that her mother’s death was avoidable.

I feel filthy. Contaminated. Tonight, I would be anything else in the world, but I dont want to be a doctor. I have now seen the dark side of this life. And it is not pretty. We are Gods, we tell ourselves. We save lives. And when we waste a life, we are too proud to admit it. Going so far as to lie in order to not admit the collective guilt.

I am ashamed of what I have said to the daughter. Yet I know that any other doctor in my position would have said the exact same thing. And that makes me more ashamed than anything else.