To Do No Harm
傷つけないために
The judge's words filled the room, and the long finally reached its end.
The court found no negligence; the death, it ruled, lay beyond any doctor's reach.
Kenji heard the verdict as if from a great and echoing distance.
There was no joy in it, only a quiet loosening of a months-long knot.
Across the aisle, the family sat still, their grief unchanged by any ruling.
He wondered whether he should have spoken to them sooner, doctor to .
Perhaps he should have explained the that lives inside every diagnosis.
If I were to face that night again, he asked himself, what would I change?
The honest answer, he knew, was less comforting than the world preferred.
With the same knowledge and the same clock, he might choose the same path.
Medicine, he had learned, is a practice of decisions made in permanent .
If he were certain of every outcome, he would be a , not a physician.
He should have accepted, long ago, that some deaths carry no name to blame.
Yet accepting is far harder than any examination he had ever passed.
If a doctor were to wait for certainty, no life would ever be saved.
The old returned to him, simple and : first, to do no harm.
But even harm, he saw now, could hide inside the most careful choice.
Were he to medicine, another patient would simply meet another tired doctor.
So he chose, once more, to carry the rather than set it down.
He should have forgiven himself sooner, but grief keeps its own slow clock.
That evening, he wrote a letter to the family he had never truly reached.
He did not defend himself; he only told them how deeply he had cared.
If I could give you certainty, he wrote, I would give it before anything else.
Some questions, he had finally accepted, are meant to be carried, not solved.
The next night, the ambulance doors burst open once more into his waiting hands.
And Kenji stepped forward, humbled, uncertain, and ready to decide again.