Most disasters are annotated into existence through small, quiet notes in the margins. It’s never a big, dramatic announcement. It’s a scribbled ‘unusual but manageable’ on a chart, or a side comment during a handoff about a patient’s strange gait. For weeks, we’ve been filling the margins of our logs with these tiny red flags, thinking we were just being thorough. But those margins are filling up fast now. There’s no more room for footnotes. The ‘unusual’ has become the baseline, and the ‘manageable’ is becoming anything but. We are living in the main text of a disaster now, and the footnotes are starting to scream.
Marginal Notes
So what happens when there’s no room left?
Then it moves to the main text.