Spring arrived and with it the second semester of nursing school, which was a different animal from the first.
The first semester had been foundational — the language of the body, the systems, the clinical vocabulary that turned human experience into professional knowledge. She'd found it demanding and absorbing in equal measure, the way she'd always found things that required genuine thinking. But the second semester was where the abstraction met the actual: clinical placements began in April, real wards, real patients, the body not as diagram but as person.
Her first placement was on a general medicine ward at a hospital in the northern part of the city. She arrived on a Monday morning in a uniform that still had the newness in it and the particular awareness of someone entering a spac
