“You have five good years left,” she said. She pronounced it, but without the authoritative tone of an oracle, without the confidence of a true believer. She said it, instead, like a plea. Like that patient who could speak only in numbers. Like she was not so much speaking to me as pleading, a mere human, with whatever forces and fates truly control these things. There we were, doctor and patient, in a relationship that sometimes carries a magisterial air and other times, like now, was no more, and no less, than two people huddled together, as one faces the abyss. Doctors, it turns out, need
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