Desiree Dougherty was the overachiever of a modest family, the daughter of a sheet-metal worker and foreman and a nurse in Rockland County, about 30 miles north of New York City. She was 5-foot-1, with a wide, warm smile, a cascade of blond hair, blue eyes and a figure that turned heads. She loved the color green; Pink Floyd; and sentimental books and movies, like Richard Bach’s novel “One,” about life’s choices, and “Pretty Woman.”

She met her future husband, Robert Pardi Jr., on her first day of college at Stony Brook University. She wanted to be a doctor; he wanted to make money. “She was a hippie chick with blue eyeliner,” her husband recalled of those carefree days, “a far cry from the Ann Taylor woman she would later become.”

She began an M.D.-Ph.D. program at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan at age 24. In 1998, she was halfway through when she decided to take a few months off to join her husband in the United Arab Emirates, where he was working as a portfolio manager.

‘It Was Bad News’

She needed a routine health screening to obtain a visa to remain in the country, and opted for a more thorough exam. At the hospital in Dubai, she later explained, the custom was for doctors to talk to the husband, even when the wife was the patient.

So her husband came home early one afternoon, and instead of taking her out for Turkish coffee and sweets, sat her down and said, “I’m afraid it was bad news.” Further tests showed she had breast cancer. She had just turned 31.

She discovered that she liked having her husband act as a buffer between her and her doctors. From then on, even when she was in the United States, her doctors were told that they should communicate only with him.

Image Dr. Desiree Pardi on duty, top, and with her husband about a month before she died.

She light-heartedly called herself “the Queen of Denial,” because she did not want to know anything about her disease. Her husband gave her just enough information to enable her to make decisions, and she always chose the most aggressive treatment. When a doctor in Dubai suggested she wait a bit before getting a mastectomy, she would not hear it. “Off, I want it off!” she insisted.