Phoebe grew up dancing countless hours at her local dance school, a place she called her second home. Anyone who watched her could see how passionate she was about moving and expressing her emotions through graceful choreography. It was in this very studio, on a day in mid-March 2017, while teaching the next generation of dancers, that she became fully aware of how persistently exhausted she was and how quickly her appetite had alarmingly decreased over the past two days. After a blood test and a very urgent call from her doctor to get to the hospital immediately, Phoebe was thrown into an ambulance to be diagnosed with the rare Philadelphia chromosome positive acute myeloid leukemia. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Early in my dance career, I admired Phoebe for her willingness to take on the physical and mental challenge of competing in several solo dances each competition season. . I remember seeing her cry from frustration and muscle soreness in the midst of her daily four-hour practice sessions, wondering how she could still get up and make her movements so fluid, the pain masked by her natural ease and grace. Eventually, as I grew up, I had the honor of being trained by her, my inspiration in dance. She ended up becoming my inspiration beyond dance. From seeing her teach balance, being on a college dance team, commuting, and taking care of her family, she has become a strong figure in my life. It was crushing to see the tough Phoebe I knew crumble under the malignant, abnormal growth of white blood cells that is leukemia. The leukemia that Phoebe was diagnosed with was a special case. In the history of cancer, the study of the chronic version of this leukemia made it possible to discover that unique and specific mutations existed in distinct forms of cancer. The discovery and founding of leukemia which had, as stated by Siddhartha Mukherjee in his novel The Emperor of All Diseases, was due to a "genetic event called a translocation, the flip-flop transposition of two pieces of chromosome" (2011, p. 366). This caused Phoebe's bone marrow blood cells to multiply uncontrollably, disrupting her blood count. Therefore, it was decided that the hospital needed to find her a bone marrow donor and in the meantime she would have to undergo intravenous chemotherapy to destroy her leukemia cells and keep her within limits. Phoebe outwardly accepted her diagnosis and treatment with the grace and strength with which she had always presented herself. Her courage throughout her journey allowed me at times to blindly and joyfully think and discuss with her the adventures we would have when she was out of the City of Hope hospital, when her leukemia was in remission. However, Phoebe's journey with leukemia was not a linear upward progression, as my naivety allowed me to hope and believe. Her journey of living with an illness consisted of high jumps with hard landings, falling from pirouettes when we thought she was going. to stick the landing, and sashays that traveled back and forth from the confines of health to the depths of disease. The first round of chemotherapy made her nauseous and her legs and hands swelled after hours of lying in bed, as she was unable to walk without feeling the need to vomit. There were times when Phoebe rejected hervisits from my family due to her excruciating headaches which were the result of oxygen deprivation caused by the treatment. The chemotherapy affected his bone marrow's ability to produce a sufficient supply of blood cells; therefore, as Mukherjee reveals occurs in leukemia patients, his “red blood cell count had dropped so low that his blood was unable to carry its full supply of oxygen” (2011, p. 18). The second round of chemotherapy caused her beautiful, long, black hair to fall out, partly due to chemotherapy that targets leukemia cells but interferes with other fast-growing cells such as those in hair. When I saw her, I couldn't help but feel my heart sink as I remembered how just a couple of weeks ago we were discussing how her long, perfectly curled hair was her favorite asset and how she planned to dye it new blonde. But Phoebe didn't seem devastated by the hair loss. He exclaimed that he would shave it to give it a new look. I could see that Phoebe had adapted to ignoring the things that no longer held as much weight in terms of importance, focusing on the more essential things that mattered to her just as neurologist professor, Oliver Sacks, did when he was diagnosed with melanoma ocular, which he reveals in his article “My Own Life” when he says: “[he felt] a sudden clear focus and perspective. There [was] no time for anything inessential” (2015). There was no doubt that Phoebe had struggled to find what mattered to her and how to plan her life around the illness that forced her to abruptly end her life journey. He began rebuilding his life by making a couple of phone calls to his college. It was decided that she would return to her studies within a year when, hopefully, the malignant growth of cells in her blood would be successfully stopped. There was a dark side to Phoebe's illness experience. Phoebe struggled just as Paul Kalanithi explained in his novel When Breath Becomes Air, "she struggled, as she faced [her] death, to rebuild [her] old life, or perhaps to find a new one" (2016, p. 139). Recognizing that she would not be able to give in to the physical demands of dance as her body fought to stay alive, she informed her college dance team that she would no longer be a member of the team. Even more heartbreaking was when he asked the principal to inform his students, the ones he had trained since they were little, that he would no longer teach them. With these decisions, Phoebe often faced the same questions Kalanithi pondered: “Who would I be, moving forward, and for how long? …Who could I, or should I be?” (2016, p. 147). After weeks of restlessness while stuck in the hospital, Phoebe decided to find a job where she would be allowed to work from home, which her doctor promised to allow her to return to for more than a few weeks after the blood test. reached a normal level after the third cycle of chemotherapy. Late in the summer of 2017, her blood count finally reached normal standards and Phoebe, relieved, went home, returning to City of Hope only for routine checks to make sure the leukemia cells weren't spreading. Phoebe organized a small gathering to celebrate with her closest friends and family. I distinctly remember Phoebe dressed in black, wearing a hospital surgical mask to avoid getting infections, and having to check the food she was served to make sure it met the dietary guidelines her oncologist had given her. During the celebration, Phoebe