[Kitsa]

No, you absolutely don't. But you're in an altered state of mind, in a very cold and dark emotional place, and you absorb anything that seems like it might be relevant to your situation. You're making grabs for any reassurance you can get that everything might be okay after all.

And if you're watching TV to try and take your mind off things, or focus on something that isn't having Hell Week at all the doctors' offices experiencing bad things and hearing even worse things, and you're watching House, and even subliminally you gave it any credence at all (again, suspension of disbelief), I can see how it could happen. You could know that you had a procedure called a bone marrow aspiration scheduled for Thursday, and here's a woman on TV having one, and it doesn't look that bad at all. And they do research for these shows, right, fact-check or something? Because it all sounds good, they use the right words. Not everyone has a medical education.

So then you walk in completely unprepared and end up curled in a ball, crying and retching in pain as they numb your skin and half an inch of fat before drilling into your hip bone with a saw-tipped metal straw. I've had some of the most brutal cancer-related procedures you can have, up to and including a botched biopsy where I literally choked on my own blood, and I will say that a bone marrow aspiration not done under general has to be far and above the most brutal medical procedure any modern-day cancer patient could have. It's more like Nazi torture.