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When Barrett Rollins walked into the bathroom of his Beacon Hill home, he was stunned to find his wife lying on the uneven tile floor covered in blood.

Rollins and his wife, Jane Weeks, were physicians and researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and lived steps from some of the world’s best hospitals. But Weeks didn’t want medical help. Instead, without looking at her husband, she calmly explained that she was dying.

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She reluctantly told him what she had inexplicably never shared: that she had advanced breast cancer. Now the cancer had spread to a blood vessel and burst through her skin.

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