She came in jaundiced, her liver failing for months without her knowing. Late thirties, autoimmune hepatitis, past the point medication could reach.
No liver transplant had been performed there before. Hers was the first. Four hours in theatre. Ten days later she went home.
You still don’t know which hospital that is. That is on purpose.
A lot of healthcare writing starts at the beginning of a thought. Here’s who we are, here’s what we’re accredited for, and only then, if the reader’s still there, a story to prove it.
That order works on paper. It’s backwards for a reader.
Somebody told me once, years ago, never start at the beginning of a thought, start in the middle of it, and it’s stuck with me longer than almost anything else I’ve been told about writing.
A reader dropped into the middle of a real moment, a woman, a clock running out, doesn’t need to be convinced to keep reading. They already are. The credentials can wait. They usually have to.
People trust people before they trust institutions, no matter how thin their attention’s worn down by everything built to take it elsewhere.
The bed count, the forty years of programme history behind a transplant unit, that does not move anyone until there’s already someone worth worrying about. Functional information isn’t wrong to include. It just never gets someone to stay.
I wrote that opening earlier this year, for a placement consultancy, under someone else’s byline. Start with the person. Let the subject earn its place after.
If your last patient story opened with your accreditations, I’d start over.