YORK — It was Sept. 14, a Friday, when the ambulance pulled up to the Wayne T. Patrick Hospice House in Rock Hill. Ambulances are common at the building. Nobody thought anything differently that afternoon.

Patients come in on stretchers, sometimes in wheelchairs. Hearses are common outside, too, usually days later. Always, patients leave the hospice house on a gurney, under a sheet, to be loaded into the back of the hearse.

Victor Bresg was brought into the hospice after eight days at the hospital in intensive care with internal bleeding from so many places that the last words coming from a doctor were whispered: “There’s nothing more we can do. ”

His knobby knees stuck out as he entered the hospice. His lungs were shot.

The workers knew the medical history. Lung cancer in 2005, tumors the size of tennis balls that went into remission after radiation and chemotherapy.

Scarring in the lungs, the cancer came back and more chemotherapy and a mini-stroke that threw Bresg for a loop that didn’t look like it would end with anything except death.