Ah, youth! Good looks, a clean complexion, muscle tone, a full head of lustrous hair—her best feature, although her legs were pretty good, too. Strength. Vitality. A happy kid with a bright future. Cheerleader her senior year. Pharmacy scholarship at the college in Fergus Falls. Geez, if her dad hadn’t died, she could have been a pharmacist. Her grades were good, but hard-luck stories were the order of the day. It was a Great Depression. She would have to take her chances. Gosh! It had been a great, wide, wonderful world in those days, and no matter what, an adventure lay ahead, something marvelous—a handsome prince and a life happily ever after. Luck was with her. Where had all the time gone? How had all the dreams…fallen away? Now she was in the Valley of the Shadow. The morphine sulfate was like a warm and friendly hearth in Gloom City, her one and only consolation.

He was supposed to be a good doctor, one of the best in the field, but he had absolutely no bedside manner. She really began to hate him when he took away the morphine and put her on Tylenol 3. Then it began to sink in that things might presently go downhill in a hurry.

They worked out a routine. If her brother was busy, her daughter drove her up to the clinic and then back down to the office, and the thin oncologist is…called away, or he’s…running behind, or he’s…something. Couldn’t they run a business, get their shit together? Why couldn’t they anticipate? It was one thing to wait in line at a bank when you’re well, but when you’ve got cancer and you’re this cancer patient and you wait an hour, two hours, or they tell you to come back next week…come back for something that’s worse than anything, the very worst thing in the world! Hard to get up for that. You really had to brace yourself. Cisplatin, God! Metal mouth, restlessness, pacing. Flop on the couch, but that’s no good; get up and pace, but you can’t handle that, so you flop on the couch again. Get up and pace. Is this really happening to me? I can’t believe this is really happening to me! How can such a thing be possible?