“It’s not like that in real life,” Audrey told her son. “My job is to help make sick people better.”

The boy winced. “I don’t feel so good.”

“You need to be patient. The medicine is working.” In truth, she had no idea, but she hoped that was the case.

Audrey placed a folder brimming with papers on the bed beside her son. “I met with your teacher and got your new assignments.” Though the boy had been in the hospital for two months with no end in sight, Audrey continued to maintain a constant line of communication with his teachers so he wouldn’t fall behind in his absence.

The boy cast his mother a frustrated look. “Can’t it wait until I feel better?”

Audrey glared at him.

“Fine.” Joshua clicked off the TV and flopped back in bed, punctuating the display with a dramatic huff. Audrey opened the folder and pulled out the first sheaf of stapled pages, thus commencing her second twelve-hour shift of the never-ending day.

Audrey had known exhaustion. She had worked the night shifts in narcotics. She had nursed a crying baby through endless colicky nights. During those stages of her life, sleep deprivation had felt like an iron anchor, growing increasingly heavier until her body couldn’t bear the weight, and she would nod off in her police car during a surveillance operation. But this was different. The fear and anxiety over her son’s mortality had put her in a perpetual state of fight or flight, and she had resisted the pull of the anchor until it eventually broke free. She had crossed over to a point where she no longer experienced the sensation of sleepiness. Instead, her body and mind were starting to behave in strange ways. She felt an electricity in her body that caused her to sweat at all hours. Her memory recall no longer worked perfectly on demand, and though she maintained an even keel externally, she could feel her mood swinging dramatically. And as she bought two packets of peanut butter crackers from the vending machine in the waiting room, the empty calories reminded her that her impulse control had deteriorated.

Eyes dry and burning, Audrey retrieved her meager sodium-filled dinner from the machine. She leaned her forearm against the glass case and slouched forward, burying her brow in her sleeve, bracing herself to return to the antiseptic cancer ward with its punishing twenty-four-hour fluorescent lights.

“Is it your child?”

Audrey turned to find an elderly Chinese man standing by her. A worn suit dusted with dandruff clung to his frail frame.

“Son,” Audrey replied.

“What kind of cancer?” the old man asked.

“Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”

“What stage?”

“Four.” As Audrey said it, the guilt came flooding back. For months, her son had complained of night sweats and abdominal pain, but she had been too busy with work to take him to the doctor. She assumed it was just another of the many bugs that kids picked up at school and that it would eventually work itself out. By the time she had noticed the swollen nodes in his neck and armpits and taken him to the pediatrician, he was already at stage four—the worst stage—and the cancer had spread to his bone marrow and liver. The doctors had initially said there was a 60 percent chance of survival, but that hinged on the boy responding to the chemotherapy, which had not yet happened.