is the way I heard it.

Some time in the early morning hours of December 11th, on the two-year anniversary of the diagnosis,

Mark decided he'd had enough.

The virus showed no sign of abating, and the pain had become unmanageable.

And so, the 46-year-old father of two hung himself, as his two-year-old son slept in

the adjacent room.

He used a dog leash instead of a rope.

His father-in-law found the body.

Mark was not the only victim who chose not to endure the symptoms of a deadly virus that

left 37,000 people hopelessly crippled.

Like smallpox, polio, the Spanish flu, and the Black Death, this disease did not discriminate.

It infected people of all races, all ethnicities, and all ages.

Although the elderly were hit particularly hard, in one retirement community considered

to be ground zero of the epidemic, eight people died while waiting for a cure.

Many more have since joined them, victims of a lingering plague that continues to afflict

thousands.

Like Mark, the victims who took their own lives did so because they could no longer take

the pain.

William Foxton, for instance, a 65-year-old British war hero and pensioner, shot himself in the

head shortly after being diagnosed.

Better to go out this way, he wrote, than to live in hell the rest of my days.

More recently, a 56-year-old entrepreneur named Charles Murphy dove out the window of

...