614 days, 5 hours, 33 minutes, 39 seconds

And his brother called everyone together in the living room, congratulated his daughter on her graduation, and then went into a story about a dog he'd seen on the road the other day. Hit by a car, he thought. He looked dead, but still he lifted it into the back of his truck and took it to the vet. The vet pt it up on the table and brought a tabby cat in and placed it by the dog's head. The cat walked all around the table and the dog didn't move and the vet wanted to charge him $200 for the cat scan.

It's not a cat scan, it's a CT Scan. She knows that now.

And tomorrow she's going for a pet scan. Radioactive, they tell her. She thinks of the vet two blocks away, with a puppy play group held there Tuesday and Thursday evenings, a bereavement group every Wednesday.

615 days, 7 hours, 27 minutes, 40 seconds

She tries not to think of her father's lungs. This is another Mt. Sinai doctor, the waiting room (small as it is) filled with women in wigs and men in yamalkas. She hears a cheerleader encouraging someone to breathe, breathe, breathe. She hears a Brooklyn accent. Her father doesn't even know she's here.