The White Coat Jury

"A diagnosis is a story told by people who weren't in the room when it mattered."

They came in formation, a choreographed invasion of white coats and clipboards, stethoscopes swinging like pendulums counting down my remaining privacy. Five of them—or maybe four, or six—the Valium made counting difficult, made faces blur into a single medical consciousness with multiple mouths, all of them moving, discussing me in the third person as if I wasn't there. Which, in a way, I wasn't.

"Patient presented with self-inflicted laceration to the lower abdomen," the senior consultant was saying. Dr Harrison? Henderson? His name badge swam in and out of focus. Grey hair, grey eyes, grey voice—everything about him was colourless, like he'd been washed too many times in hospital bleach. "Approximately fifteen centimetres, reaching the uterine wall."

Fifteen centimetres. They'd measured my desperation in metrics, quantified my breakdown into neat numerical values. I wanted to tell them it was actually fifteen years long, that the cut had started when I was seven and had just taken this long to reach the surface.

"How are we feeling this morning, Heather?" A younger doctor, blonde, eager, the kind who still believed medicine could fix everything. He leaned over me, speaking slowly and loudly as if I was deaf rather than drugged.

"We," I said, or tried to say. The word came out thick, malformed. "Are we feeling, or am I feeling?"

Someone wrote something on a clipboard. The scratch of pen on paper sounded like fingernails on wallpaper, like the sound my childhood bedroom door made when it opened at night.

"Are you experiencing any pain?" The blonde doctor again, his smile practised, professional, empty as a cleaned-out jar.

Pain? I wanted to laugh but my mouth wouldn't cooperate. I was made of pain, constructed from it, built on a foundation of it that went deeper than any scalpel could reach. But they meant physical pain, the kind they could measure and medicate, not the kind that lived in your cells and whispered in your dreams and made pregnancy feel like drowning in your own body.

"Four," I said, because they needed a number, needed something to write on their charts. "Maybe five."

"Good, good." More writing. They loved writing, these white coats. If they wrote enough words, maybe they could rewrite what had happened, turn it into something medical, manageable, fixable.

Dr Grey—I'd decided to call him that—moved closer, and I could smell his cologne, something expensive and subtle that reminded me of funeral flowers. "We need to examine the incision site. Make sure there's no infection, check the healing."

They pulled back the hospital gown without asking, because my body had become public property the moment I'd opened it myself. The air was cold on my skin, and I felt myself float up to the ceiling, watching from above as they prodded and discussed the angry red line they'd sewn shut.

"Healing well," someone said. "No signs of dehiscence."

Dehiscence. What a beautiful word for coming apart at the seams. De-his-cence. The undoing of his essence. The rejection of his presence. The absence of his—

"Heather?" Someone was snapping fingers near my face. "Can you stay with us?"

But I'd never been with them. I'd been performing presence while being fundamentally absent since I was seven. This was just the first time the absence had been made visible, carved into skin, impossible to ignore.

"The psychiatric evaluation," Dr Grey was saying to his chorus of white coats, not to me. "She'll need to be assessed before we can consider discharge."

Discharge. Like pus from a wound. Like electricity from a battery. Like a gun firing. All the meanings collapsed together in my medicated mind.

"Can you tell us what happened?" The blonde doctor again, pen poised, ready to transform my truth into medical narrative. "In your own words?"

My own words. As if I had any. As if words hadn't been stolen from me along with everything else when I was seven and learned that "no" was just a sound that didn't stop anything, that telling brought punishment not protection, that silence was the only safety even though it wasn't safe at all.

"I broke," I said, the same thing I'd told Noah. "The glass broke. I broke. Something had to break."

They exchanged looks—significant, medical, the kind of looks that meant increased medication, extended observation, careful documentation.

"Had you been experiencing thoughts of self-harm before the incident?" A female doctor this time, younger, kinder eyes, but still part of the white coat jury, still judging me from the safe distance of their intact lives.

Incident. They'd renamed it already. Not attempted suicide—though was it? Not child endangerment—though was it? Just "the incident," like a spill in aisle three, something to be cleaned up and forgotten.

"I've been harming myself since I was seven," I said, and watched them shift uncomfortably. "Just usually more quietly."

"What happened when you were seven?" The kind-eyed doctor leaned forward, genuinely curious, but I could see Dr Grey's warning look—don't encourage the delusions, stick to the medical facts.

What happened when I was seven? How did you compress that into words they could write on their clipboards? How did you explain that your body had been colonised so early that pregnancy felt like reoccupation? That every kick from the baby had been an echo of other violations, other times your body had done things without your permission?

"Nothing medical," I said finally, giving Dr Grey what he wanted—denial, deflection, the closing of doors he didn't want opened.

"The baby," someone was saying, "Luke—he's doing well. Have you seen him?"

They all waited, pens poised, ready to document my maternal response or lack thereof. This was the test—would I ask about him, show appropriate concern, perform mother-love convincingly enough?

"Three pounds, four ounces," I recited. "Sandy hair. Green eyes. Breathing independently."

"Would you like to see him?" The kind-eyed doctor again, hopeful.

I would like to dissolve. I would like to evaporate. I would like to become the space between molecules, the pause between heartbeats, the silence between words. But that wasn't an option they were offering.

"Maybe tomorrow," I said, because that was the right answer, the one that showed progress without eagerness, healing without rushing.

More writing. They wrote down everything except what mattered. They wrote "patient stable" instead of "woman fragmenting." They wrote "responding to medication" instead of "disappearing into pharmaceutical fog." They wrote "improving" instead of "learning to lie more convincingly."

"The sutures will need to stay in for another week," Dr Grey was explaining, though I'd stopped listening. His voice had become white noise, like static on a television, like the sound the ocean makes when it's trying to erase the shore.

They moved around me, checking things—blood pressure (high but not dangerously so), temperature (normal, as if anything about this was normal), reflexes (present but sluggish, like everything about me). I was a collection of statistics now, measurements and medications, vitals and variables. They'd reduced me to data points because data was easier to fix than damage.

After that the words came loose from their meanings. I caught pieces of them the way you catch leaves in a current—follow-up, community team, medication review, when she's settled—each one drifting past before I could decide whether it mattered. Someone was talking about a week, or a fortnight, or a date I'd already forgotten. Someone answered. The conversation went on perfectly well without me, which was the thing I'd always suspected about conversations: they didn't really need me in them. I only had to be the body in the bed they happened around.

"Any questions?" Dr Grey asked finally, the consultation drawing to a close.

Any questions? I had nothing but questions. Why had God been watching when He created Luke but not when I was seven? Why did men in white coats think they could stitch shut wounds that went deeper than skin? Why did everyone insist on fixing me when being broken was the only honest thing about me?

"When can I go home?" I asked instead, though the word 'home' tasted false, like artificial sweetener, like medicine disguised as sweets.

"That depends," Dr Grey said carefully, "on your psychiatric evaluation. On whether we believe you're... stable."

Stable. Like a house built on sand. Like a marriage built on silence. Like a family built on pretence. I'd never been stable. I'd just been good at looking steady while falling apart in slow motion.

"I understand," I said, and I did. I understood that I would need to perform recovery, act out healing, pretend my way back to a life that had been pretence all along. The white coats needed their narrative—hormones, temporary psychosis, treatable condition. I would give it to them. I'd been giving people what they needed my whole life, why stop now?

They filed out as formally as they'd entered, a recession of white coats and clipboards and careful conclusions. But the kind-eyed doctor lingered for a moment at the door.

"Heather," she said softly, "what happened to you—not yesterday, but before—it matters. When you're ready to talk about it..."

"I'll never be ready," I said, honest for once. "Some things don't get talked about. They just get carried."

She nodded, understanding more than she should, and I wondered what she carried, what all women carried, what we passed down through our bodies and our silence and our daughters who would learn the same lessons we'd learned about what could and couldn't be said.

After they left, I lay in the silence they'd disturbed, feeling the weight of their judgment, their documentation, their medical certainty that I could be fixed. The Valium made everything soft and distant, but not soft or distant enough. I could still feel the sutures pulling at my skin, could still taste the medication on my tongue, could still hear Luke crying somewhere in this hospital—or was that just memory? Was that seven-year-old me crying in a pink bedroom while everyone slept?

The white coat jury had made their assessment: unstable but treatable, dangerous but manageable, broken but fixable. They would increase my medication, schedule my evaluations, document my progress. They would write their story of hormones and temporary madness, and that would become the official truth, the medical record, the thing everyone could point to and say "that's what happened" when what really happened could never be written on any clipboard, never be fixed by any surgery, never be medicated into manageable proportions.

I closed my eyes and felt myself scatter again—into particles, into possibilities, into all the women I could have been if I hadn't been broken at seven, if pregnancy hadn't felt like being broken again, if breaking myself open had actually set anything free instead of just making the cage visible.

Later the psychiatrist would come, wanting to excavate my mind the way the surgeons had excavated my womb. Later I would have to find new ways to tell the truth while lying, to reveal enough damage to justify what I'd done but not enough to keep me locked away.

Later I would begin the long performance of recovery.

But now, in this moment between examinations, I could just be what I was—sutured and sedated, documented and diagnosed, a medical problem with a medical solution that would never touch the real problem, never reach the real wound, never heal what had been broken before my body had even learned what wholeness felt like.

The light slanted through the hospital window, casting shadows that looked like bars on the white wall. Or like lines on a page. Or like the pattern wallpaper makes when you stare at it for fifteen years, waiting for morning, waiting for help, waiting for someone to see what was happening in the shadows and make it stop.

But no one ever came. No one ever saw. And now they were looking at the wrong thing entirely, examining the wrong wound, trying to heal the wrong damage.

The Valium pulled me under again, and I let it, grateful for this chemical permission to disappear, to stop performing consciousness, to stop pretending coherence when I was made of fragments held together by nothing more than sutures and stubborn biology that insisted on continuing even when continuation was its own kind of cruelty.

Somewhere, Luke was learning to breathe. Somewhere, Paul was learning to walk. Somewhere, seven-year-old Heather was learning to be silent.

And here, in this white room with its white coats and white lies, I was learning to heal incorrectly, to scar in the right patterns, to break in acceptable ways.

Always learning the wrong lessons. Always healing the wrong wounds. Always, always performing recovery while drowning in the damage they couldn't see, wouldn't see, didn't want to see.

The medical record would show improvement. The real record, written in cells and silence, would show something else entirely.