In writing, by the form on their website, checking every box, requesting the complete designated record set for three patients.

And then I waited four months.

I want to describe those four months, because they are the part of this that people find hardest to believe and that I find hardest to look at.

I lived a completely ordinary life.

I taught two sections of AP Chemistry and three of general.

I ran a birthday party for eleven one-year-olds on the third of March with a cake shaped like a bear.

I went to my sister’s in April.