Brian, who had been our friend since before any of it, had two as well, and he was the only person in our lives who ever asked me straight out how I was doing and then actually stood there and waited for the answer.

And every January I would think: this is the year.

Part Two: Everything We Tried

We tried all of it, which is a sentence I have said to people in about four words and which took us a hundred and nineteen months.

There were the early appointments, back when we still believed it would turn out to be something simple that a tablet could fix.

There were the charts, and the thermometers, and the small plastic sticks that I kept in a shoebox for reasons I could not have defended to anybody.

Then there were the tests, which went on for most of a year, and which I remember chiefly as corridors.

Then the treatments.

The injections, which I learned to do myself into the fat of my own stomach at ten o’clock at night, standing at the kitchen counter, with the cold little bottle sitting in a bowl of warm water beside the kettle to take the sting out of it.

The pen with the dial on it.

The sharps container on the top shelf that I had to hide when anybody came round, because there is no explaining a sharps container at a dinner party.

I got good at it.

That is the strange thing.

By the end I could do my own injection while answering a question about something else entirely.