It was my fourth and final hospital stay. I was admitted to the eighteenth floor and placed in a room next door to where I had last seen Melissa. It felt like a cruel joke that, out of the hundreds of hospital rooms at Sloan Kettering, I would end up here. Melissa and I even had the same nurse, a woman named Maureen with a fire-hydrant-red pixie and matching lipstick. I begged to be transferred to the leukemia or transplant floor, but the hospital was over capacity, so there was nothing anyone could do. Being forced to sleep just a few feet away from where I had said goodbye to my dead best
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