Ed and I spent his last weeks afraid of infection because of the lowered white blood cell count chemo causes: limiting visitors, limiting hugs and kisses and handshakes, forbidding children to visit. For the past two years we’d been a kind of “aunt and uncle” to a friend’s small child. Because he was on chemo, he never hugged little Maddy again, and the last time she ever saw him, she was scared to go near him because she’d been warned she might make him sick.

I spent my days in a state of vigilance, trying to protect him, staring alertly in the wrong direction for an enemy I didn’t know how to recognize. We made a trip to the emergency room, leading to an overnight hospital stay, because I thought he was running a temperature that might indicate an infection: a trip that was expensive, exhausting, upsetting, and cost him all the eleven pounds he had managed to regain after our initial hospital stay. And he didn’t have an infection after all.

What if he had had an infection?

Would it have made sense to fight against it like a tiger if that meant intervention cascading after brutal intervention, family shoved aside while the doctors desperately tried one more tactic to rescue a dying man from a quicker death?

We were afraid of the wrong things.