First, Do Harm

In a small Midwestern clinic, Sandra Briggs has it all figured out—her caseload, her supervisor, and the colleague she's quietly positioning to be her next connection to a better social life. What she doesn't have is any interest in being wrong.

When Carol Malone walks through Sandra's door with fatigue, a dragging foot, and the quiet terror of a woman who has already watched her mother lose her body piece by piece, Sandra sees not a patient in crisis but an anxious woman looking for attention. For six months, Carol submits to sessions that reframe her symptoms as dysfunction, her fear as manipulation, and her body as an unreliable narrator. Meanwhile, Sandra protects her position through a hidden affair with her supervisor, uses an intern's minor form error as a weapon, and carefully cultivates a wealthy new colleague for reasons that have nothing to do with clinical care.

When a neurologist finally orders an MRI, the white spots on the scan are unmistakable: multiple sclerosis, present and progressing. Sandra's response to the truth is the most revealing thing she does in the entire story—and it costs her almost nothing, because systems built by people like Sandra tend to protect them.

FIRST, DO HARM is a taut, unflinching novella about the quiet violence of professional arrogance, the long cost of being believed too late, and one woman's hard-won right to know what is happening inside her own body.