"When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything. Images come in flashes-people and places and stray conversations-and refuse to stop. I see my best friend from elementary school as we make a mud pie in her back yard, top it with candles and a tiny American flag, and watch, in panic, as the flag catches fire."
"On May 25, 2024, my daughter was born at seven-oh-five in the morning, ten minutes after I arrived at Columbia-Presbyterian hospital, in New York. My husband, George, and I held her and stared at her and admired her newness. A few hours later, my doctor noticed that my blood count looked strange. A normal white-blood-cell count is around four to eleven thousand cells per microlitre. Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microlitre."
On May 25, 2024, a woman gave birth at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital and ten minutes after arrival delivered a daughter. Hours later clinicians noted an abnormal white-blood-cell count of 131,000 cells per microlitre, far above the normal four to eleven thousand, prompting concern for leukemia. Her husband, George, then a urology resident, contacted physician colleagues as doctors debated whether the elevation related to pregnancy or leukemia. Parents brought the couple's two-year-old to meet his sister while the mother was moved to another floor and the newborn went to the nursery. The diagnosis produced intense recollections and immediate family upheaval.
Read at The New Yorker
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