In July 2009, exactly five years after I had looked down the microscope into Carla’s bone marrow and confirmed her first remission, I drove to her house in Ipswich, Massachusetts, with a bouquet of flowers. It was an overcast morning, excruciatingly muggy, with a dun-colored sky that threatened rain but would not deliver any. Just before I left the hospital, I glanced quickly at the first note that I had written on Carla’s admission to the hospital in 2004. As I had written that note, I recalled with embarrassment, I had guessed that Carla would not even survive the induction phase of
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