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She was familiar; my medical school prom date two years ago. She was number 4 on my list of women I had slept with. She had sent cookies, made sangria in my apartment and ran laps around the hospital where I studied when she was training for the Chicago marathon. Before her cancer and the chemotherapy, before she stopped returning calls and saying ‘I love you.’

She was a substitute for sweater girl. Who I still miss, see pictures of her on Facebook in Halloween costumes with her new boyfriend. The one she texted me three months ago to tell me she moved in with.

We had golfed twice over the summer after we broke up, shared fried shrimp and sandwiches and she told me about her treatments. She was thin and would close her eyes for seconds. Exhausted. Cancer at 24.

I want to tell her to stay away. That I have others; the physical therapist, the histrionic medical student from Iowa, the social worker who just returned from Greece, the tennis player I knew in college. They are better. They are new; they smell different, wear heels and skirts without leggings. I take them out for sushi and Ben and Jerry’s; they teach me about new flavors, new wines and they kiss with their bottom lip.

I don’t say these things. We have tapas and watch Friends re-runs. We drink beer and trade insults and she invites me to her bed. I leave at 3 AM, and she comes over the next day. She hugs my mom and picks up my dog. She plays poker with my friends, and we laugh. She takes my hand under the table, I lose track of the betting, who raised and who asked for more food my mother brought home from the catering job she took to offset my residency interviews.

We fall asleep on my couch. She kisses me before she leaves in the morning. I walk her to the garage. She tells me she had fun. I smile. We make plans to go tailgate at the Michigan-Nebraska game. I know she’s a mistake.

Stop writing. Stop reading. Stop noticing interesting shoes with different color laces on people riding the El. Stop counting if Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts has more business with people that patrol Michigan Avenue. Stop thinking about the childhood of the tattoo artist with a nasal piercing and strip of gray hair and wondering if her mother was around to walk her to the bus on the first day of school. If she ever knew her father’s name.

Read Robbins. Read Bates. Read test prep books for the USMLE. Forget Hemingway, Eggers, Diaz or Thomas. Use Pledge to take the dust off their covers as they sit on your desk unloved and neglected.

Hate and un-hate your best friend when you find out he still talks to Sweater girl and find out they joke about traveling to see each other.

Sit in a hospital with your father after quadruple bypass. Fight with your sister at 3 AM when you explain to your father about Ketorolac and she calls you a show off and tells you to stop. It won’t matter. He’ll tell the nurse who loves Notre Dame football more than checking vital signs to change the morphine to the Ketorolac and tell you it’s working better.  Stop asking about electrolytes. Stop checking his chest tube output your sister will tell you. Stop being so calm, she will say as she leaves the room to make a phone call or send a text. Drive back to Chicago in the car that he bought for you after 4 days with him.

Forget about the girl with yellow running shoes and your trips to Africa. Don’t buy Velveta cheese and bacon bits because those are her favorites. Don’t check her Twitter account. But keep her in your phone, just in case.

Find new girls, ones that are terrible kissers but bring you beer from Wisconsin so you keep them for another two weeks. Ones that are virgins that act in plays and ones that are blonde and train for triathlons with new bikes that you buy a speedometer for. Go to a bachelorette party with a girl who spells her name wrong but that you spend nights in your neighbor’s hot tub with and who dances with you at a club while you pretend you were with her best friend. The one with the referee striped top, long dark hair and heels to match, and who reminded you of the best friend that you loved in high school.

Grow a goatee. Shave it after 3 months. Grow it back.

Go to church. Pray about things, about your father, about your grandmother’s dementia and your grandfather’s atrial fibrillation, about passing tests, and that the extra heart sound you found on yourself was normal after the heart surgery you had when you were 10. Light candles, cross yourself too many times and donate five dollars every Sunday to the offering bin. Go to confession each week when you start sleeping with the triathlete. Realize this can’t be good for karma with the boards coming up.

Consider a dog. Make excel spread sheets to calculate finances. 40 dollars a month. 200 dollars a year for vet bills. Decide this means having to find someone to watch it while you’re on call, while you’re out at night, when you go home for weekends and breaks. Decide not to get a dog.

Spend 12 weeks on surgery. Jot things down that can’t be said here.  Read Marion Winik’s The Glen Rock Book of the Dead. Decide to write about patients in this way. Try to get it published.

Stop eating so many frozen, microwavable dinners from Trader Joe’s. Cook sundried tomatoe chicken instead. Sauté asparagus and mushrooms with Greek seasoning.

Start writing again after 13 months.

And if she asked me what we should pack, I would tell her yellow running shoes and a flashlight. That is all we would need. They would make everything better.

I hate you, I tell her.

I hate you for saying you hate me, she says.

I hate you and I still have your sweater. And your note from the care package you sent. With cookies and sour patch kids. And a box of nerds.

She tells me it can’t work. It involves too many other people. That she’s not that kind of girl. That it’s not just about her and me. There are too many lives at stake.

Too much to lose, not enough to gain. At least not right now.

She tells me to cut the losses. Find a new girl. I do. A brunette. One who isn’t more than five feet four inches and loves country music, salsa dancing and strawberry-banana smoothies. Someone different.

Another medical student? she asks. Does it matter? I say to her. No, it’s better I don’t know, she says.

You always seem to break even, she says out of consolation. Like when you dumped me over Thanksgiving for whats-her-name. You always have someone.

There’s one more text later that night. Around midnight.

Tell your new girl she’s really lucky.

“You got his heart and my heart and none of the pain. You took your suitcase, I took the blame. Now I’m tryna make sense of what little remains, oh ’cause you left me with no love and no love to my name.

I’m still alive but I’m barely breathing. Just prayed to a God that I don’t believe in. ‘Cause I got time while she got freedom. ‘Cause when a heart breaks, no it don’t break, no it don’t break, no it don’t breakeven, no.

What am I gonna do, when the best part of me was always you? And what am I supposed to say when I’m all choked up and you’re okay?

I’m falling to pieces, yeah. I’m falling to pieces, yeah. I’m falling to pieces. (One’s still in love while the other one’s leaving). I’m falling to pieces. (‘Cause when a heart breaks, no it don’t breakeven).”

The Script, Breakeven

There were highlighters. Gel pens. Dry contacts and a trip to Trader Joe’s with my Red Sox date buddy.

And this song.

You never change your mind once it’s made up. –How You Survived The War, The Weepies

She called me last night at 11. After I locked myself out of my condo and before I finished my laundry and the storm came.

Then again at 6.

Once more by 7, and had neuroscience lecture at 8.

They say to drink gatorade, the friends that bring it over in the afternoon. They bring soup in a can, a 12 pack of sprite and saltines to go with my peanut butter sandwich dinner.

I tell them thanks, and hug them as they leave. The one whose car is in the shop and the one she asked to drive her to the store.

I look at her picture on the wall. At the one in the gold frame next to my bed.

I need my nurse.

Because she is love, and she is all I need.