[it's not about being worse than them - it's that it happened at all, and that she didn't say anything. things piled up on top of the others, all damning in their own right. all of it signed and sealed her fate, and she long ago accepted it.]

I couldn't sustain the clinic I was in, after medical school. Good intentions to save everyone only get you so far when the debts start growing, after all. So...I started expanding in what I could offer, into proscribed services. It was a compromise of everything I'd sworn to uphold, but, well.

[it was hard to argue when you knew you had the funds to keep supplies in stock and to keep a roof over your head.]

It was easy to keep going, once it started. To have more, to climb higher and higher - all possible by simply saying yes. I got arrogant, greedy, losing sight of what I had sworn in the first place. Agreeing to things I shouldn't have, even in my volunteer work, even when I had misgivings of the consequences. And then-

[a breath to steady herself. she can't meet their eyes to keep going, she has to look beyond them, at the wall.]

One night there was the worst sort of accident. Someone, one of my patients...she bled out on the operating table. A victim of my carelessness. And instead of saying anything at all, I threw her body out to the trash and ran. Everything had to be left. My clinic, my home, my name.

[so many details that she's not adding, but saying this alone is like extracting her own bones, painful and bloody. she ran to save her own skin. could only leave a letter, and hope that the asylum would be reformed before yet more lives were shattered. she doesn't deserve being called a doctor, even though people do.

but now they know. she's no better than they are. just putting up a better front to the world, and trying to rearrange the pieces into something that does a drop of good to halfway make up for it.]

...Everything that happened after that was deserved. Has been.

[every death, earned.]