It comes at her with talons and beak—after the first treatment, she winds up in the emergency room, tethered to an IV in a curtained cubicle, listening to the audio of what sounds like a television drama but isn’t. An elderly woman calling out for help, a doctor speaking loudly and testily to an underling, a man relentlessly berating his wife in Spanish while a baby cries at regular intervals, like a chorus. At six a.m. she and Sarah crawl back into a cab and ride home with their eyes closed as the sun comes up.

And it gets progressively worse, the exhaustion and illness so wretched that she feels like a dying animal. There is something of the barnyard about all of it—the earthiness, the smells, the sheer bovine physicality of being in such a body, plodding from the bed to the bathroom on tottering legs. During a particularly bad afternoon when Sarah is at work, she hears herself as if from a great distance. The sound she’s making is resonant and sustained, like the lowing of a frightened steer.

And then gradually she’s well, the monster scoured clean with a wire brush, slinking off to watch her from a distance. She doesn’t care. Fuck the monster. She takes up running again and sits in the sauna breathing steam into her cells, a towel discreetly knotted over the hollow spot on her chest. Eventually the stares get to her and she decides to undergo reconstructive surgery. This is routine, a process by which tissue from the groin is fashioned into a breast, like building Eve from Adam. Only it isn’t God running the construction crew, it’s Sloan Kettering.

Something goes wrong on the operating table. She comes out of surgery shaped like a woman again but unable to walk, one leg slack and rubbery, refusing to hold her weight. Eventually she leaves the hospital on crutches and calls Linda from a chair in the center of her living room, staring into the kitchen at her cup of tea on the counter. They’re going to waive my bill, she tells her friend. Nerve damage, Linda replies. Positioned wrong on the operating table, probably. Get them to help you.

But they remain thin-lipped and silent, unwilling even to diagnose the problem, let alone treat it. She tries everything from the crutches to a walker to a leg brace, hobbling, learning to carry her tea without spilling it but never figuring out how to work on the train without standing or walking. Disability runs out and Amtrak lets her go. She loses not only her paycheck but her pension and her benefits. She drags her leg up and down the street each day like a zombie with a crutch nestled against her new breast, while pedestrians eddy around her and joggers sweat in the July heat.

It’s night of the living leg, she tells Linda.

Come home, Linda says.