The old man arrived at high noon, he was alone, carrying his last 5 scans in a plastic bag he bought from a supermarket next door. 3 doctors had told him 3 different things, and on the fourth step of the stairs of the last clinic, he stopped believing in men in white coats.
He did not want a 4th opinion, he did not want to go over his insurance details and he did not want to hear the mechanical bells that ring inside a busy clinic. He wanted to be told what was wrong with him, and how to fix it, if it could be fixed at all.
I wrote that last night. There is no old man and there are no stairs.
Anybody would object, and an objection would be fair. Of course, the reader would be moved, because none of it is real. Invented patients are free, they won’t object. A writer with a blank page can put a plastic bag in anyone’s hand, print a supermarket on the side, let your own grandfather finish the work in your head. No real facts, a skeptic would argue. Show us a real institution, where a legal team and a communications office read every public sentence twice and object to half of them.
Fair. This opening ran this year. A real hospital with a real case, every word checked thrice before going live.
“A 37-year-old patient walks in with a persistent dry cough that hasn’t responded to treatment. A CT scan, then a biopsy, confirms what the cough was trying to say: stage 1 lung cancer.”
Next, he is in surgery. Part of the lung comes out through a single incision three centimetres wide.
And then it hands the reader this.
“Two days later, the patient goes home; not the 5 to 7 days a conventional thoracotomy would have required, but 2.”
Two days is a fact from a discharge record, looked at like every other fact in the piece is looked at, and it does the work a paragraph of adjectives could not. You are in the deep end of one man’s week, you have followed him from a cough to a diagnosis to an operating table, and you still have not been told anything about a building.
Only after the 2 days, when the reader wants to know where such a thing happens, does the hospital step forward. Burjeel Medical City.
For both openings, the invented and the checked one. The name comes last.
Every hospital page you scrolled opens with the name, then a superlative reaching for your lapels. World class. Leading. Trusted. Pioneering. You have learned to leave at the shadow of it, the way you might hang up on a call centre inside the first sentence. A page that opens with its own name has declared itself an advert, and nobody reads adverts. The people who commission adverts do not read adverts.
Let the name wait. Fill that space with a person. A cough that will not respond. An old man on a staircase running out of belief. The reader will ask it himself on the second paragraph. Where does a thing like this happen? Who does this?
Then the name, only then. Let the name land on a reader who already wants it.
A paragraph earlier, the name is a billboard. Change the order and it becomes an answer.
Now, you may only withhold the name if what stands in its place can hold the weight, detail holds weight, detail has to be gone and gotten.
The incision, the two days, the claim that it was the first in the country, those came out of records, the dull pages nobody opens, and every one of them had to survive a reader paid to catch it wrong.
The old man cost something too.
You have to know that the scans ride in the bag because the envelope from the imaging centre tore months ago. That he comes at noon because mornings are for people with appointments. Invented detail gets checked against life instead of records, and the reader runs that check without knowing they are running it. They report the result by staying or by leaving.
The piece with the cough was for doctors, doctors don’t like reading about hospitals, unless it is their own. They read the cough and the two days and the incision. Those are units his own life is made of. By the time the institution says its name, he is a different reader than the one who started.
The test travels everywhere. An About page, a founder story, a case study, a book, the piece you are working on now. There is only one question. Is anything in the reader asking for it yet?
I write long form for healthcare companies. If your pages could read like this, my inbox is open.