I've told the outline of my story many times. A failing valve, hospice, a clinical trial, a second chance. What I haven't told is the part in the middle, the part that doesn't fit neatly into a sentence, because it isn't really a medical story. It's a waiting story. By the time I entered hospice, my tricuspid valve had already failed. My care team had been watching it happen for years, telling me plainly there was nothing yet available to fix it. That kind of sentence changes

For decades, if your heart needed fixing, there was really one answer: open-heart surgery. For most people, that's a serious but manageable proposition. But for cancer survivors people whose bodies have already been through radiation, chemotherapy, and the deep exhaustion of getting well once already that answer often came with an asterisk. Too complex. Too high-risk. Not a candidate. If you've heard those words from a doctor, you know exactly the feeling that follows: like a