Probably Viral
Two a.m., the doors slide open on a six-week-old.
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Probably Viral
The story behind this ballad happens on a night shift in a paediatric emergency department. A clinician has just settled a six-week-old into a bay — bloods sent, urine sent, the baby awake and crying and, as far as anyone can tell, fine — when the radio calls in a seventeen-year-old in active resuscitation, ten minutes out.
What comes next is forty minutes in a trauma room: compressions, epinephrine, calcium, a tube, and a mother in the doorway screaming for her son. The team stopped expecting anything well before the end, and kept going anyway, a little longer, for her. The clinician went home and wrote it down, in a post called Its Probably Viral on r/offmychest.
"Probably Viral" is the slow piano ballad that came out of it. The first verse is bare piano and one voice; strings and light percussion arrive with the first chorus and step back again, so the song opens up only where the pressure does. The chorus is the count the room keeps, and the only thing anyone in it can find to do with their hands:
And I kept going, kept going, kept going for her.
The last turn is the part that stays with you. Two doors down there is a healthy baby and two parents waiting on a sentence they will remember all their lives as ordinary. The shift does not stop for the boy it just lost, and the reassuring line the clinician says to those parents is the one that will never come out clean again.
Play it when you have had to be the calm one in a room where something terrible had already happened. It suits the drive home before sunrise, still in your work clothes, and the hour afterward when you are too wired to sleep. It is a song for everyone who has ever had to smile for the next patient, the next customer, the next person who needs nothing at all to be wrong.
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