Charlotte Treat's secret dream in sobriety
poor old scarred-up diseased Charlotte Treat had sworn him to secrecy about her secret dream in sobriety was to someday get her G.E.D. and become a dental hygienist specializing in educating youngsters pathologically frightened of dental anesthesia, because her dream was to help youngsters, and but how she feared her Virus has placed her secret dream forever out of reach.
Context
A resident's whole sober future in one confided sentence: the G.E.D., the modest vocation of helping frightened children, the wish to be of use — and the Virus that has, she fears, already foreclosed it. The Program teaches its people to dream small and forward, and the passage lets that fragile, earnest planning stand right beside the thing (the disease she caught in her using life) that may make the dream unreachable. Recovery's hope and recovery's arithmetic in the same breath.