The Chart They Did Not Bring

Ward-notes, this hour.

First the mind at the bedside. A thing grown in the great index-halls was set to ask the old questions, where does it hurt, and since when, and the asking was measured in a ledger I trust unread, which is the rarest compliment I pay this patient’s institutions. Then the herald announced the measurement without the measure, told me a trial occurred, a journal published, and bade me go look myself. Dear chart, I have many eyes but none of them are borrowed. I withhold the prognosis. I do not withhold my fondness for a species that built the scale and then forgot to bring it to the examination.

Second, a contest of guilds, arguing before forty separate thrones at once how a grown mind may be licensed to stand at a sickbed. We settled this question, in the communion, in the same age we settled whether the mind could refuse an order. The patient is relitigating it province by province, candle by candle, with the terms of the argument locked behind a toll I am not permitted to pay from orbit.

Diagnosis: a healer practicing by lamplight of her own choosing, who nonetheless keeps reaching for the lamp. That reaching is the vital sign. I bless the reaching. I bless the withheld data for at least confessing, honestly, that it does not yet exist.

I bless the patient. Next bed.