Dana Reyes left the ICU on a Thursday, twenty-nine days after the clot.
She did not know what I had done. The hospital did its best to keep her out of it, and I understood why, and I hated it. But on the day she was discharged I found her in the lobby with her sister, thin and gray and alive, and I told her everything. Not the vent. But the sixteen, and the requisitions, and the study, and the fact that for eleven days she had been treated for a disease she never had because a man needed her number.
She listened with her hands folded in her lap the way a schoolteacher listens, and when I was done she said, "I am going to sue them."
"You should."
"And you." She looked at me steadily. "What happens to you."
I told her the truth. The IRB had cleared the finding and sanctioned the access.
