The first time I took Carlo to the hospital was two years ago, in August of 2020. This was after the province’s first wave but pre-vaccine, the summer of park beers and long walks; the flat line of case numbers was just starting to tick slightly upwards. It was early in the morning, sun searing through the curtains. For some reason I flared awake out of a dream, and when I turned to look at my partner of six years, I saw that he was already awake and staring blankly into the middle distance. His skin was so pale it looked see-through; his teeth were chattering a little. Can you feel my forehead and tell me if it’s… hot hot hot? he asked. The rhythm of this sentence is still burned into my brain. I touched him. Terror.

My father drove us to the ER. It was the first time we’d been in someone else’s car since March. We rolled down the windows; it was a beautiful day. I could not remember the last time I’d been this far downtown.

I felt panic and apprehension and also a sense of nauseous inevitability, like I was stepping into my destiny. Carlo’s immune system doesn’t work the same way as other people’s, and for the last five months I had been some weird, unnatural blend of actuary, caregiver, statistician and philosopher, trying to weigh all kinds of factors I didn’t fully understand to mitigate the risks of a situation I couldn’t possibly wrap my mind around. I knew, intellectually, that superstition is just a way to pretend you have control over situations where you have none. But deep down, I still felt like I should have seen this coming, like maybe there was something I could have done differently.

They wouldn’t let me into the hospital room with him. Too risky. I remember sitting in the waiting room, feeling panic crackle through my nerve endings every time someone pulled their mask down or coughed. The threat of COVID seemed to be everywhere; I could imagine nothing worse than him having it. When Carlo texted me and said he’d tested negative, I felt overwhelmed with relief. Then he told me they couldn’t figure out what it was at all. They monitored his levels, took his blood, kept him for a few days, and sent him home again.

Sometimes it’s just like that, he told me after, being sick. There’s so much mystery, stuff you never get to know, things that don’t get wrapped up or neatly explained. You just kinda have to keep it moving.

Overnight, the word “immunocompromised” flourished in our brains, in the news, in the mouths of politicians.

When I first met Carlo he was living in Victoria, but had come back to Toronto to spend Christmas with his family. His dad had picked him up at the airport and, when they got home, informed him that his mother had cancer and would be going for surgery in a couple of weeks. They’d been waiting until he was back to tell him. That night, after everyone went to sleep, he logged on to a dating app to distract himself. The algorithm showed him many pictures of different women, and one of them was me.

When I got to The Common for our coffee date, there was a man in a brown suede jacket sitting on the bench outside. He looked like he’d stepped out of another era, kind of a young Peter Falk vibe—handsome, rumpled, squinting at the ground. When I followed his gaze I saw that he had just spilled a full, fresh coffee right in front of him, all across the sidewalk. Sucks to be that dude, I thought, and then walked into the café to find the man I was there to meet. When he tapped me on the shoulder I could not stop myself from laughing.

We walked around Dufferin Grove, giving each other the point-form summary. At this point, Carlo had been alive for 32 years and had had three human livers in his body. The one he was born with stopped working in his mid-20s, while he was living in Montreal and being a classic Montreal guy—creative writing degree, acoustic guitar, restaurant job, shitty apartment, cool girlfriend. His vices were cigarettes and eating whole cans of Pringles for dinner; liver disease wasn’t really on the radar. But one week he started to feel a little off, and then the next week he felt worse. His eyes were getting kind of yellow in the corners, and his hands were getting callused for no reason. One night he vomited blood, and the next morning his partner took him to the ER, and then suddenly he was dying.

It took the doctors months to diagnose him with a rare liver disease. The only cure was a transplant; he shot to the top of the list because he was young and healthy, with a high chance of recovery. They installed the second liver in his body, and for a while things seemed like they were getting better. He learned to walk again, got used to the enormous scar that partitioned his torso. Then his body started to reject its new organ.

This time, he came back to Toronto, where the doctors told him he was not going to survive. He needed a transplant again, but livers are in perpetually short supply and high demand; there were many people on the list who hadn’t even had their first one yet. He’d blown his shot. For months, his loved ones would bring him to the hospital, where the staff would get him well enough to send him home to die.

One day when he was in really bad shape, just a few steps away from the end, his partner called an ambulance. Once he was in front of them, his doctors were obligated by their code of ethics to do everything they could to save his life—so when a liver suddenly became available, they had to give it to him. Right place, right time. This was how he gained his extra life, the one where I was meeting him now: algorithm of chance and fact and privilege, true love, impossible timing, ancient oath.

When I asked him whether being sick had taught him any lessons about life, he said he hated the way people always seemed to want to turn near-death experiences into inspirational stories. Like when you hear some guy talking about how he was in a car wreck, but now he climbs a new mountain a day and never takes a single thing for granted. Almost dying doesn’t automatically give your life meaning, he told me. You still have to make it for yourself.

In the first few months of falling in love, I would walk around vibrating like a dowsing rod that had found its source. I was terrified. Of what? Vulnerability, sure, and being known, and tethering my life to the life of a man whose “phone” was a Blackberry taped to a cracked iPod touch. But I was also scared that he was going to die. Not just eventually, in some abstract way, but sooner than the average person, in a manner that could be predicted but not prevented. Neither of us ever used the word immunocompromised back then, but I knew that he was on medication that disabled his immune system so his body wouldn’t know the liver was someone else’s. The pills he took were so toxic he had to wash his hands immediately after touching them; they lowered his body’s defences so effectively that even a small cut or a common cold could quickly evolve into a deadly infection. I would watch him swallow them dry by the handful and think of his ex-girlfriend, who spent years sitting beside his hospital bed while he twitched in and out on a morphine drip. I can’t do that, I’d think, and then feel ashamed for thinking it.