The Physician's Confession
332 Words
They said they did their best.
They said they didn’t know.
But in every autoclaved room,
in every logbook and coded file,
a shadow kept its shape.
The doctors who once called themselves saviors
sat beneath fluorescent confessionals,
their hands trembling,
not from illness but memory.
They had worn white coats like armor,
believed in the purity of purpose,
believed in the oath: Not harm.
But harm, like infection,
doesn’t always announce itself.
At first, it was easy to believe
that the system would correct itself.
That the next shipment would be pure.
That the rumors were exaggerations
from frightened families
and overworked nurses.
They told themselves
that progress required risk,
that the few must fall
for the many to live.
And so they sterilized their conscience
as they sterilized their tools,
believing they could cut cleanly
through the moral wound.
But the numbers grew.
The funerals multiplied.
And the charts—
those tidy maps of suffering—
began to resemble prayers.
Some couldn’t sleep.
Some left medicine altogether.
Some drank until their own veins sang
with the same poison they had tried to deny.
A few stood before cameras,
their eyes hollow as empty wards,
saying we regret it.
The words hung in the air,
too light for the weight of the dead.
They spoke of oversight,
of unforeseen consequences,
of a time before testing was certain.
But language can’t disinfect a lie.
Each sentence was a gauze
wrapped around a hemorrhage.
And still—
A few did weep.
A few sat by the bedsides of those dying,
holding the hands of strangers
whose faces they would never forget.
They saw the color drain,
and in that fading red,
They saw themselves.
For even the guilty bled.
And in that shared mortality,
Some found a twisted grace:
the knowledge that all healing
begins with admission.
But by then,
The world had already buried
The evidence with the victims.
And the white coats hung in closets,
smelling faintly of antiseptic,
and sin.
- Writer
