Sorry I've been gone for so long.

After my Liver Incident, I was hospitalized for the longest time. It was like jail. When I was in there, in that stark white hospital room staring at the wall, at the flickering images on TV, I could hardly keep any food down and had to be on an IV drip. I was drugged up, I accepted blood transfusions. I lost weight. A ton of weight. I lost 20 pounds in less than a month. I was grateful that the community was helping us, and I was grateful for what they were doing for us. For me. For Ulquiorra. But, I mean, it's kind of hard to express your gratitude to these people when you're sitting in a bed and all you have the strength to do is go around and click channels and occasionally say a few things to the doctors, like "I'm feeling good." "No, it hurts." "I want to see Ulquiorra." That kind of stuff.

Now, recalling this incident makes me feel really guilty, especially because it was on his birthday. Two months after my Liver Incident. Yeah. That's how important it was to Ulquiorra. So important that he was enticed to capitalize it. And what made me feel even more guilty was that he was there to watch me slowly die. No. I didn't admit that I was dying. But I knew it. And I think he knew it too.

My fevers went up and down. I was on at least a seven on the pain scale of one to ten. (It was probably higher than that, but I didn't want to worry Ulquiorra. I didn't want him to get lines between his eyebrows.) Of course, he probably worried. But whatever.

So here's what happened.

I lay down on the table for my CT scan. It was Ulquiorra's birthday. I wanted to give him the world. I wanted to give him everything. But I couldn't. Because of my condition, and because of what else happened that day. I vaguely remember looking up at him and smiling like I was drunk through my fever. I remember holding his hand, looking for something, anything, to show that he cared. That he loved me. That he wouldn't leave me. That everything was going to be okay.

I went into the chamber. The female voice told me to "Breathe in." I breathed in. And then it went black.

When I woke up a few hours later, Ulquiorra wasn't in the room. I felt like a child. Lost, insecure, afraid that I was being abandoned. A few moments after that, when my heart rate started to drive up, like I was having a panic attack, Ulquiorra came back in. There were tears on his face, both old and new, and there were more clinging to his eyelashes. Through hiccuping sobs, he told me what had happened.

Apparently, both my lungs collapsed when I breathed in. The doctors rushed in and restored my breathing using a breathing tube. My brain didn't suffer from the temporary oxygen loss, and the cancer on my liver had apparently grown since the last surgeries to stop my internal bleeding. But I was bleeding. Again. My liver had increased in size and was squashing my other organs. I coughed up the breathing tube and was put on High Flow Oxygen through a nose tube. My heart rate was around 130-170, like I was constantly working out. And it sucked. At that point, I just wanted to die already. I wanted to kill myself. I wanted to hold my breath in long enough that I passed out, and then I wanted to keep holding my breath until I died.

But I couldn't do that. No. Not for me. For Ulquiorra. I had to keep on living for Ulquiorra.

The stuff that Ulquiorra put up on our blog don't show what I went through. Well, they show it, but not the mass enormity of it. I know, it sounds like I'm being conceited about what I went through. But it's true. I was in so much pain, I wanted to kill myself. Suicide by strangulation by white hospital sheets. Ripping off the ventilator, suffocating myself to death.

With Ulquiorra, with my testicular cancer, I found God. Not Buddha, not Allah, but God. I became religious.

Through all of this, Ulquiorra was strong. Stronger than I could ever be. Even when we both knew I was dying. Here's one of the entries he wrote for our blog. Let me read it to you.

"Hey, you guys. It's me, Ulquiorra. Grimmjow is doing...well. Or as well as a struggling cancer patient can be. Thank you all for your support, your gifts, and your food (hospital food actually isn't that good, and God knows that Grimmjow could never survive on the same stew of beef mush, carrots, and peas), and most of all, your prayer. Without you guys praying for us, I don't think Grimmjow could have made it this far without it, and I probably would have gone insane if you guys hadn't prayed for my mental sanity. Grimmjow's getting some pretty intense treatment, but he's a fighter, all right. He doesn't have much energy, true, and at the end of the day, it takes all his stamina just to tell me he loves me. Just three words. 'I love you.' That drains him. But every morning, he's up again, fighting through the rest of the day, and together, we watch the day fade away to the moment where he tells me that he loves me. And then the cycle begins all over again.

"Grimmjow says that he wants to make more entries in this blog. He says I type really slowly. He wants to do more video entries, he says he doesn't care that he looks like an alien. He says he wants the world to know what he's going through, and that he says he wants to be a beacon of inspiration for cancer patients everywhere.

"Hey, you guys, if you have children, tell them how much you love them. If you have a spouse or a significant other, tell them you love them. Tell the world you love them. Stop the hatred, stop the suffering. Stop the pain. Even if only for a little while. Please, help us stop, for even a few moments, the pain and the sadness of this broken world. Because, all in all, it's the little joyful moments that matter. The moments that last five minutes and then pass. The moments that people cherish when they are suffering. Please help Team GJ create more of these moments. And most of all, LIVESTRONG."

Pure poetry.

Ulquiorra was whispering soft stanzas into my ears even while I passed away at home.