The bruised face of a teenage girl stares into the camera. This is what passes for a selfie in the life of a quarantined cancer patient with a hospital room for a last known address.

Ashley Krueger was supposed to don a surgical mask and head home that very day. No stops in between; just her North Port home. Such is life for a 19-year-old confined to bedrooms, hospital rooms, and examining rooms for what seems like an eternity.

Yet the night before her discharge from All Children's Hospital Johns Hopkins Medicine, she began to spontaneously bruise. Her legs turned black. Her eyes looked like she had lost a prize fight, and her forehead was sporting what seemed like a purplish water stain.

"No idea where it came from,'' she wrote on iPhoneogram.com. "Just sitting there watching TV and get(ting) ready to get in bed and bam. It's the worst headache I've had times a thousand. And I just want to go home, I'm sick of it here …''

So laugh in your loneliness

Child of the wilderness

Learn to be lonely

Learn how to love life that is lived alone

From The Phantom of the Opera

The folks from a children's network wanted to know: What is it you might wish for?

Ashley went days without answering. The two mothers who adopted her long ago — Cindi Krueger and Pat Myers — had almost given up on the question.

And then, out of nowhere, Ashley told them:

I want to see The Phantom of the Opera … on Broadway.

She had seen the theatrical version on television and had fallen in love with the story of a disfigured man terrorizing a Paris opera house while simultaneously tutoring and falling for a chorus girl. Plans for a trip were drawn up and plans were scrapped. The timing never worked out with the children's group, so the moms began plotting on their own.

This was almost two years ago, and the trip is now a few weeks away. Flying was out of the question due to inflammation in her blood vessels and the chance for contagions, so they plan on driving along the Eastern seaboard. Hospitals, hotels and restaurants have been alerted to help accommodate Ashley's needs.

For a girl who has been in quarantine for more than a year, a trip like this is not without its drawbacks. Ashley may have been cleared by doctors to go, but that doesn't mean it is risk-free.

It's just that the alternative would be even worse.

"We can't pull this out from under her,'' Myers said. "Yeah, we might be taking a bit of a risk, but if we don't, she'll never allow herself to look forward to anything ever again.''

There is another consideration left unsaid:

Can you afford to wait on a future so uncertain?

Twisted every way,

What answer can I give?

Am I to risk my life

To win the chance to live?

From The Phantom of the Opera

You should know that, for the moment, Ashley has beaten cancer.

Not just once, but twice. Two very different, very vicious forms with less-than-encouraging survival rates if you were to bring the numbers to an oddsmaker.

She first learned she had cancer the day before her Sweet 16 birthday party, and her body has been ravaged and battered ever since. The problem now is that the cure has been nearly as deadly as the cause.

She has had a shoulder blade amputated. She has had a stroke. She has had two rounds of chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant, tumors pressed against her heart and pancreas, the early stages of menopause and a laundry list of marrow-rejecting infections.

She had to be airlifted to All Children's Hospital Johns Hopkins Medicine after she stropped breathing at home once, and she has now logged more than 500 nights on the hospital's grounds.

For Ashley, life must be lived in measured doses. When she is able to eat, her food comes from sealed boxes. Her surroundings must be forever sterile. Her nonhospital friends must plan visits in advance, but that's not a huge problem since so few seem to come around anymore.

And when she grieves? Well that must be measured, too.

A crying jag could lead to a sinus infection and that could turn deadly for someone in her fragile condition.

"Kids die. We see it all the time. Kids Ashley has been close to,'' said Myers. "When it happens, we give her 20 minutes to cry.

"You hear that and you think, 'Oh, my God, you're horrible.' It's not that. We're fighting for her life, and we have to go into survival mode at times. As mean as it sounds, the doctors say that's the rule. Her uncle was diagnosed with cancer not long after Ashley, and when he died, we had to tell her: You can cry for 20 minutes.''

All I want is freedom,

A world with no more night …

From The Phantom of the Opera

Two days remain in Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.

Nearly 16,000 Americans under the age of 21 are diagnosed with cancer every year and just about one-quarter of them do not survive, according to the American Childhood Cancer Organization. There have been at least a dozen moments along the way when Cindi and Pat had to brace themselves for the idea that Ashley might become one of those statistics.

"She's walked away from things,'' Pat says quietly, "that she should never have been able to walk away from. She is so strong, so incredible.''

Somewhere along the line, Ashley began to crochet. Taught herself while killing time in a quarantined room.

Concerned that her mothers had a mountain of medical bills, she began selling her creations on her website (ashleystouch.com) in a futile attempt to fund her own trip.

And when Childhood Cancer Awareness Month rolled around, she posted a message on iPhoneogram.com with a long list of lessons cancer has taught her.

"It's taught me that while Superman and Spiderman may seem pretty kick-butt,'' she wrote near the end, "no super hero can amount to the strength and bravery of these little kids who face this horrible monster in the face and decide to fight with everything that they have …''

For a short time next month, Ashley will call a temporary halt to her fight.

She will live life the way it is meant to be for a tall, beautiful, blue-eyed, blond teenager. She will leave her quarantine, adjust the surgical mask on her face, and sit in a darkened Broadway theater watching the story of a tragic man living life behind a mask.