She was a child. When we saw her at the funeral directors, all the discolouration from the Busulphan was gone in her face. We didn't check out the rest of her, she was zipped up then. And you know, the overwhelming feeling I got was that she wasn't there.
She still had the hat, knitted by a breast cancer survivor, on her head, and the dress she never got to wear on her 9th birthday, being already on oxygen and feeling very ill. The psuedomonas and metapneumovirus having already done their work on lungs with damage unable to be detected by every test from 4 rounds of 7-10 days straight of chemo from 1 December 2011 to 10 May 2012.
I didn't Google too much, after her diagnosis and cytogenetics. Instead, I went to two doctor friends and other friends, particularly a genius who achieved a PhD in genetics at 25 and qualified as neurosurgeon in the US at 30.
Her FLT-3/CD135 positive abnormality was utterly damning, particularly because she did not remit of this abnormality after the induction round. She remitted of the translocation 6,9, the less-worrying, and was in morphological remission, but the other was still there. I had wanted to see someone alone, to hear the truth alone, so he met me on Skype. 'Here I am, alone in my room,' he said. Then he told me, he'd hacked them, he'd read everything, he'd consulted with others, he works in a world-renowed place. He said her bone marrow was FUBAR, no one knows why or we'd not be here, but his opinion is that she was born with it and it had a viral trigger, based on the history of her he'd collected from me, which would have happened sooner or later, and that trying to transplant her was the only way forward, as every drug known to treat AML had been used on her to obtain remission and maintain it. He concurred completely with her consultant and with the care she'd received and so did everyone he'd conferred with, but he made it clear, the risk of death from the procedure, but that the balance was greater of relapse. Far greater. Only later did I learn, persons with such a FLT3 mutation are mostly damned.
Her cancer was incurable with chemo alone, and we were SO blessed to have the consultant we did. 'It WILL come back,' was what she had said. And though I didn't want to believe her, and mostly didn't till the end, she was right, and had a vast amount of experience to draw on to make such a statement, I just didn't know her well enough then.
If she hadn't died, what would have been ahead? We'll never know.