I’ve spent my entire career repairing hearts, but nothing in medicine prepared me for the day I met Owen. He was six years old, far too small for the hospital bed that swallowed him, his body thin and fragile, his eyes too large for a face drained of color. His chart was brutal in its honesty: a congenital heart defect, critical, life-threatening. The kind of diagnosis that strips childhood away and replaces it with fear and uncertainty. What struck me most wasn’t the medical complexity. It was his politeness. He apologized constantly—to nurses for asking for water, to orderlies for...
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