Some of the patients smell it too. I had one patient whose taste buds had been decimated by chemo. Though she said everything tasted like cardboard, she couldn’t shake the metallic smell of the chemo coming from her own body. She washed her clothes as soon as she returned home from the hospital and showered twice a day out of desperation. One man told me his wife had started sleeping in a separate bedroom. She’d come up with some excuse to avoid hurting his feelings, but he’d overheard her talking to their grown daughter on the phone about his “cancer stink.”

“Knock, knock,” I say, standing in the doorway. Marilyn smiles as I enter. There are deep circles under her eyes.

“Hey, Doc,” she says.

“I heard you came in. How are you feeling?”

“Lousy,” Marilyn admits. “But not as lousy as a few hours ago.”

“That’s a start. You’re a little dehydrated too. But that bag of happy birthday fluids should fix that.”

There’s a linen tote bag on the chair, decorated with an image of a long-lashed woman wearing a bandanna on her head and boxing gloves for fists. Warrior is written in pink scrawl above the picture. She is a reinvented Rosie the Riveter, doing her part in this new war. I lift the bag and set it on the windowsill.

Marilyn’s war is ramping up. She’s just had a whole-body scan done, with positrons and electrons colliding in a crash of light. The wound is where the light enters, my father used to say, quoting Rumi. As if he knew about radioactive isotopes and imaging. Clouds of brightness on her images correspond precisely with spots where Marilyn has been having more pain—her left hip, the middle of her back, and her right shoulder.

She sighs and glances at her bag.

“Ah, what I would give not to have to be a warrior today,” she says. “I never even wanted to play dodgeball.”

“I don’t trust anyone who enjoys dodgeball,” I say, and she smiles weakly.

She looks wistful.

“Are you going to give me bad news today?” she asks.

“I’m going to tell you what your scan showed,” I say.

She listens. She looks frightened and angry and exhausted. She takes a breath. What she says next surprises me.

“Two months before my daughter was born, I painted her room carnation pink. It turns out her favorite color is moss green. She’s almost a teenager now, and I promised her I’d help her redo it how she wants,” she said.

And I know she will. Because when people have a reason to live, through some alchemy of the spirit, they make it happen. Warriors don’t wage war dreaming of immortality. They step into the fight assuming the posture in which they want to be remembered, like posing for a statue.