Every Sunday evening, for me, is Ning He time. Before 2008, we called each other every now and then. Around Thanksgiving 2008, she called and told me that she had cancer. She asked me to get it checked because she is the second cousin who’s got this kind of cancer in our extended family. From then on we talked every Sunday evening sometimes for as long as 5 hours.
From those calls, I witnessed the heroic fight she put up against the disease. While an average stage 4 patient has less than 1 year after the diagnosis (per her doctor), Ning He had 2+ years when she was relatively healthy and living life to the fullest. After the first two rounds of successful chemo/radiation, not-so-good news started to appear. She would not dwell on them instead she focused on the next fight. Every time I would be upset and down hearing about those news – without exception she would lift me up by the end of the call and I was, like her, full of hope again. She was truly the A+ patient - I told her that if the doctors could bottle her spirit, they would have prescribed it to all their patients.
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