The hush after a stent

Pulled off a tricky one this morning — right coronary, calcified, the kind where you're not sure the wire will ever find its way. It did. But the part I keep thinking about is the silence after: the patient's family in the waiting room, the way nobody speaks while the screens go quiet, and how that hush has started to matter more to me than the instrument work ever did. Somewhere along the way I stopped being the person who needs to save everyone and became the one who just needs to sit with the people it happened to.