Chapter 12: It's never going to be the same.

The letters and phone calls became sporadic over the next year. Carter and I talked maybe once every three or four months. If something important happened he would call me and we'd chat but other than that, we were pretty much long distance friends. Doug and I talked more frequent with the phone calls coming at least once a month of course he called whenever his daughters did something that he thought I should know about and he finally got the hang of sending emails although I had to laugh, Anns stuck cause when Doug would type, he'd always it the s rather than the a.

He would send me pictures of the girls and they were getting so big, and he and Carol were finally talking about getting married, which made me happy cause those two were destined to be together, that much I knew.

I flew out to Seattle July of 2001 for Doug and Carol's wedding, it was one of the greatest days of my life seeing those two finally tie the knot. I stayed in Seattle for a week taking the girls so that Doug and Carol could have some grown up time without little fingers pushing through under the door or having to worry about being walked in on.

Then it was back to my life in Philadelphia once again and things there managed to keep me busy for the most part. I had thrown myself back into work loving every minute of it. I fully understood what I loved about my job and being in the ER helped to keep it fresh, never the same thing twice and you never knew what was going to come through those door at any given moment.

The holidays came and went and we all exchanged Christmas cards. I sent small gifts for the girls and a very cheesy tie to Doug more as a gag than anything else, something to make him think of me every now and then and to get a good laugh from.

Things were good and life couldn't have been going any better or so I thought. January came and I came down with what I thought was the flu. I felt horrible, nauseated to the core, at times I had trouble catching my breath and I completely lost my appetite. Two weeks had passed and I wasn't feeling much better I was barely able to eat half the time working I would lose track of time, or so I claimed and just simply forget to eat. The nausea had passed some although it did hit every now and then and I was losing a lot of weight not that I had a lot of extra to begin with. But I still really didn't think that much about it.

February came and I still hadn't gotten up to speed, I was still overly tired and well I just attributed it to the stress of everything, my first thoughts were that Max and I were going to have a baby, but mother nature told me otherwise. I was working a lot of hour's maybe I just needed to cut back a little and stop pushing myself so hard.

March came, another month passing by and nothing that I was doing seemed to help, the reduction of hours I was still tired, still not able to eat much more than a little bit at a time and for the most part. Finally after three months of not feeling like myself Max was able to talk me into going to the doctor. I hated going to the doctor, I was a doctor and therefore if something was wrong with me I should know it. I didn't think that anything was wrong. But this time I was wrong, dead wrong.

It was the beginning of April when I finally did end up seeing them and they told me the diagnosis. I wanted to cry and that was just what I did. Nothing could have prepared me for what they had found. I was too young, I told myself. This isn't supposed to be happening to me. This happens to other people not me and I knew that doctor had to be wrong just wrong; I could not have ovarian cancer.

It took me an hour to try and find the courage to explain it to Max. I just didn't know how to tell him that I had something this terrible. We went through all the lab tests that the needed I had my chest tapped and drained of the effusion to help so that I could breath, CT scans to see where all it might have spread to, I think that I gave them enough blood to provide transfusions to a small army.

I hadn't told Doug or Carter about any of this yet, I just didn't know how. Most of my own family didn't even know about it and I wasn't sure that I did want them to know about it yet. I would eventually tell them but this was all so new and raw to me that I just couldn't do it yet.

May was a month that I would never forget. It was about 2 in the afternoon when the phone rang and Carol called me. She was in tears telling me that Mark had died. I sat down in the chair next to the phone after I had hung it up and cried.

Max and I both went to his funeral but neither of us said anything about what had been going on with us in Philly. It wasn't the right time and it wasn't the place and he and I caught a plane back home shortly after the funeral. The shorter time we were there the less likely it was that something was going to come up.

I had surgery at that point to remove the cancerous tumors and any dreams that we might have had about having children went up in smoke. I then went on my first round of chemo and was still able to keep in touch with Doug and Carter via email now rather than snail mail. But I just couldn't tell them what was up with me. I would lie and tell them everything was fine when they'd ask.

By Christmas of 2003 I had finished my first round of Chemo and things were looking good until that spot came back, and then it all started again. I knew that the odds of beating this were not good, it was a highly fatal form of cancer that had only a 50 five year survival rate and that stage 4 was not promising.

2004, was not the start of the best year for me either, things just kept going down hill. I did chemo and lost my hair, then I did radiation didn't help things much either. I ended up moving out of the apartment and away from Max in March of 2004. I didn't think that he needed to watch all of this happen and it was just better if we let go now.

I had tried all that I could try, given it every effort that I could over the time that I had. I knew that there were some things that I needed to do before time ran out completely there were some things that you always knew and then there were some things that we never certain. And I wanted to do everything that I could before my time on earth was through. I set of on a mini trip of sorts to see old friends, to say goodbye and to let them know just how much they meant to me.