"My beautiful partner, who has seen me through so much pain with compassion and care, has to be away for work, and I can feel us growing slowly apart, since life is so determined to display its full complexity right now," she wrote, recalling her time in the hospital. "I am surly and distant. I offer nothing. He reminds me again and again that I am still a woman and still alive, but I also know that soon — for so many reasons that have nothing to do with my uterus — we'll slip away from each other and I will face everything I am losing in impossibly tiny steps."