Because maternity wards smell like dorm bathroom bins when all the girls are taken by their periods and everyone is too tired and too annoyed to empty messes into dumpsters. Because birth and death share a scent. Because everything is too bright, too white, too stark: lights, walls, sheets. Because blood and sweat and urine and shit usher new life into the world, then seep and ooze and trickle as life makes its way out. Because even though you scrub and brush and wipe with obsessive zeal, even though you drape yourself in the assurances of expertise, the metallic smell of fresh blood lingers in the halls of the surgical wing, clings to nostrils, haunts instruments.
