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type of leukemia is definitely life threatening, although not necessarily terminal. In other words, although it’s a very serious illness, if we attack it now, immediately and aggressively, we’ve got a reasonable chance of at least getting you into long-term remission. Hopefully, we can even cure you.”
    Peg blinked her eyes several times as she tried to absorb the words she had just heard. She knew she understood the words, but for several seconds she had difficulty believing they had been directed at her.
    “What do we do?” she whispered.
    “We’re having the most success against this type of leukemia with chemotherapy,” Dr. Goldstein replied. “Do you know what chemotherapy is?”
    “I think so. Maybe. I don’t know.”
    “Chemotherapy is a treatment regimen involving the introduction of chemicals into the body. Chemicals which kill the cancer cells, in your case the cancer cells in your bone marrow, while not affecting the healthy cells in the rest of your body. I have to be honest with you and tell you this isn’t the most pleasant form of therapy, but it gets the job done. Usually, treatment continues for two to four weeks. Ideally, at the end of that two-to-four-week period, the cancerous blood cells have been killed, leaving only healthy non-cancerous cells in your body. At that point, you’re in what we call remission. We then discontinue the chemotherapy, and your body begins to repair itself, hopefully free of cancer.”
    Peg stared at him, her eyes wide with terror. I’m not hearing this , she thought, feeling the terror start to engulf her again. This cannot be happening to me. It can’t be. It just can’t be.
    She struggled to find her voice. “What do I do now?” she asked, her voice hoarse from fright.
    “Well, first, if you want me to treat you, I need you to consent to my being your attending physician. Is that what you want?”
    He waited for Peg to answer. “In other words, do you want me to be responsible for your treatment?”
    “Yes,” Peg replied.
    “Okay. Consider that done. Now the next thing we have to do is get you admitted to Huntington Hospital as soon as possible. Can you check in tonight?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’m sorry for the urgency, but given your condition, time is not exactly our friend.”
    “I understand.”
    “I’d also like you to ask your husband to come to my office tonight so I can bring him up to speed on what we’ve found and how we’re going to treat you. I’ll be here for at least another hour and a half. Do you think he can get here in that time frame?”
    “I think so.”
    “Good. I’m going to call the hospital now while you go home and pick up whatever you need.” He looked at his watch. “It’s five after six now. Can you be at the hospital by seven?”
    “Yes,” Peg answered quietly, tears rolling unchecked down her cheeks.
    Dr. Goldstein pushed his chair back, stood up and started to come from behind the desk to escort her back to the outer office. The consultation was over.
    “We can beat this,” he assured her. “Believe me when I say that. There are a lot of things we can do today that were unheard of ten, even five, years ago. We can beat it. Believe me.”
    By the time he had finished saying this, he had come around to the front of his desk and now stood barely three feet from Peg’s chair. But she made no move to rise. Instead, she sat totally still, staring at her hands, still carefully folded in her lap, one on top of the other. Tears ran down her cheeks and fell onto the back of her hand. She tried to wipe the tears away with her fingers, first from one eye, then from the other.
    Finally she spoke. “I have a little girl who’s almost three and a little boy who’s only eight months old. They both love me very much. They both need me very much. What’s going to happen to them if something happens to me? What will they do without me? What will they do without their mommy?”
    Dr. Goldstein took a step closer to her