Middlegame

If you could rewind back to a certain point in your life and make a different decision, would you? That's not really a question in this book - the main characters can do this and they do it over and over. They keep dying, the world keeps ending, and they keep going back to some key moment to choose differently in the hopes of getting a better outcome. It proves to be a tricky balance. You have to accept certain formative experiences, no matter how painful they are, in order to become the kind of person who can save the world. Happiness doesn't exactly lead to strength.

Still. If you could take something back, would you? I'd like to know what would have happened if Kevin hadn't gotten the bone marrow transplant. Would the cancer have come back? Would chemo have worked a second time? Would we have decided to go through with it anyway, and just delay this outcome a few years? Would it have been better? Would it have been worse? What if the doctors caught the GVHD sooner? He never spiked a fever, which is the key symptom, so it took them a long time to diagnose. Would the steroids have worked if he'd been able to take them sooner? Or was this all just set in stone from the moment he got his leukemia diagnosis.

I'll never know the answer to these questions, so asking them is only ever painful. And besides, this book comes around to the other half of that question: if you could re-write history, how would you know when to stop? Life's never perfect, but when is it good enough?

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