When you have spent as much time in hospitals as I have, you develop an instinct not just for illness but for institutional failure. I did not like the sound of any of it. A physician with a pattern. Complaints that never stuck. Administration that preferred quiet settlements over formal accountability. A culture in which nurses’ concerns could be brushed aside. I had seen the machinery before. Medicine protects its own until public scandal makes that protection more expensive than discipline. The families left in the wake of that calculation seldom recover as neatly as the legal files suggest.