Well then started the 15 months of Jane's leukemia. And of course one of the terrors was that my own cancer would return and I wouldn't be able to take care of her, but it did not, at all. Five years after my liver operation, when the cancer had not recurred, I was considered cured, or am cured, but by that time, Jane was herself dead. She was hospitalised for a month to be put into remission by means of chemotherapy. I wanted to be with her as much as I possibly could so I rented a motel room near the hospital, it's about an hour away, so that I didn't spend so much time driving back and forth. And Jane's mother, who had moved to New Hampshire two or three years earlier, moved into this house and took care of our animals, our beloved dog, Gus, and an old cat, while I spent every day, all day, pretty much, by Jane's bedside. And oh, her hair fell out... started to fall out so she had it shaved, and all the predictable effects of chemotherapy. At the beginning our attitude - hers and mine - about her leukemia, was certainly not that death was inevitable, it was as if, well, this is the worst challenge we've ever faced... oh boy, what a... what a tough time... but the assumption that she would come through. But really the chances were always rather poor, as I came gradually to understand. She had ALL - acute lymphoblastic or lymphocytic leukemia - which is the kind that kids get, and these days kids largely recover from it, but when you are... how old was she then? She was 46. When you are 46 years old and you get it, your chances are not nearly so good. There is a protocol for treatment - I think two years of treatment - lots of different chemos followed by radiation, that cures some people and so we started on that. But then there's a complication. Every leukemia's almost different from every other leukemia, there are minute differences which can show in an electron microscope of the DNA of the cancer cells. There's something called a Philadelphia chromosome - because it was discovered in Philadelphia at some point - and it's a fragmentation in two of the strands of DNA, and no one knows why, but when the cancer cell has this fragmentation, the chances of cure by chemotherapy become nil - it's impossible. We didn't discover this, or we weren't told it - I think the pathologists were originally not certain - we didn't know it until perhaps late February or March, but that meant there was only one possibility to save Jane's life, which was a bone marrow transplant.
