A not so easy death

"Oh God" She thought as she awoke, unable to draw a breath. "Oh God, I can't breathe. I can't breathe." This had happened before, but never this bad. She knew from her nursing background that this was a distinct possibility, the cure becoming the killer. Cytoxin was the latest drug she'd tried. Lucky enough (if you can call it that) to be chosen for an experimental treatment at Johns Hopkins. Of course, it could damage the lungs severely. So many treatments, so many years: too many drugs to remember; biopsies; a bone marrow transplant; and Interfeuron. A lot of Interfeuron. Gallons of it over the last decade.

As she tried to get up from the bed she fell, prone on the floor. Her husband awoke to her gasping and saw her on the floor. Panic and adrenaline took over as he rushed to her side, she weakly pointed to the bed, unable to speak. "Put me back, please. Put me back in the bed. Oh God, I can't breathe..."

"O.K.  he thought, call 911 and they'll get here quickly."  He made sure to ask for the volunteer fire department from the neighboring county. The city ambulances have been known to get lost from time to time. When they arrived a few minutes later, the crew got to work immediately. They put her on the stretcher to get to the nearest hospital. She knew it well, just having spent the Christmas holidays there after a tumor broke her femur, a pretty sturdy bone.

(Hospitals- she had been in so many for so many prolonged stays over the years. The first one was ten years earlier, when visiting her elderly mother, she had a sharp pain near her neck. At first, she dismissed this as a muscle pull, but later tried to put her jacket on and felt a pain "like a spaceship was trying to land into my back" as she later recalled to her sons. She went to the hospital. The news was gruesome: a tumor had eaten a vertebrae and the cancer was systemic. There really was no hope, just time to buy.)

On this, her last day on earth, she had wanted to die in the bed she had known for the previous 39 years. But there had been so many miraculous recoveries, why would this morning be any different? That's how everyone, especially her husband, felt. Except her, she knew it was time to go. She had already told everyone in her own way, they just didn't all understand.

Now it fell upon the grieving husband to call his two sons that their mother was no longer. They were inconsolable, but again, in circumstances like this, a sense of duty overrides emotion and what must be done gets done, somehow. 

The hardest part for the youngest son was driving to the hospital later that afternoon to pick up his mom's personal effects: a nightgown and a plastic bag marked "biohazard" that contained a watch and rings. He's never opened it and it sits unmolested in his house to this day. Or was the hardest part of the whole episode seeing his 96 year old grandmother cry at her daughter's wake? No one should ever have to bury a child.

The woman's husband died of a broken heart two and a half years later. That's a story for another day.

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