Critical Condition

From rising author Juliet Velxley comes a tense, deeply human medical drama that explores what happens when a lifetime of experience collides with bureaucracy, bias, and the brutal arithmetic of survival.

Dr. Althea Brooks has spent nearly three decades in the emergency room at County General, long enough to know the rhythm of chaos by heart. She knows which chest pains are real, which silences are dangerous, and how to make life-or-death decisions in the space between one breath and the next. Her hands have steadied thousands of strangers. Her judgment has saved more lives than anyone can count.

But experience doesn’t protect you from politics.

After a catastrophic night under disaster protocol leaves the hospital overwhelmed and two patients dead, Althea finds herself facing her first malpractice lawsuit—one the administration seems all too willing to let her shoulder alone. Suddenly the hospital she helped hold together begins to treat her like a liability. Her shifts are scrutinized. Her authority quietly undermined. A young resident is positioned as her replacement. Words like efficiency and restructuring start to follow her down the halls.

And beneath it all lies a truth she knows too well: being an older Black woman in medicine means being twice as competent just to be considered half as safe.

As new crises flood the ER—viral outbreaks, mass casualties, impossible shortages—Althea continues doing what she has always done: showing up, choosing who can be saved, carrying the weight of every name. But when she uncovers evidence that the hospital altered records to protect itself, the fight becomes bigger than one lawsuit. It becomes a reckoning.

Because medicine isn’t numbers on a spreadsheet.
It’s people.
It’s witnesses.
And some doctors don’t go quietly.

Tense, intimate, and fiercely human, Critical Condition is a gripping medical drama about survival—on the hospital floor and inside a system that was never built to protect the people doing the saving.