still bad, and he would write me a script for morphine syrup. Of course the pain was still bad because mouth and throat ulcers don't magically become painless overnight. So I knocked on Natasha's kitchen door (she lives upstairs from me and is my landlord, but more importantly one of the neighbours who helps me out) and asked her to drive me to the hospital, and she changed out of her pajamas, tossed her son in the back of the car, and thus I met Dr. R, one of the head oncologists on my case, for the first time at 10:30 in the morning at Princess Margaret outside the bank of glass elevators in the lobby. We went up to the dark and empty 18th floor (my second weekend in a row doing this) and he pulled up my file. He called my pharmacy to make sure they had the right concentration of morphine for me and told me that my blood cultures from my ER visit on Thursday night had come back with a potential bug, and that if I continued to have fevers later on in the day, I would have to go back to the emergency room to be admitted for IV antibiotics. I'm sorry, he said, this treatment isn't supposed to be so hard, but you seem to be having a round of bad luck and while this bug is a common one and we usually assume it to be nothing more than a skin contamination