Cheryl's final days

I guess I can go ahead and get this written.

After the "we're down to chemo" diagnosis, Cheryl was pretty down. We spent the night with our friend Beth, and she cried herself to sleep with me beside her.

I don't think she ever called the oncologist in Lewiston who would have dispensed her drugs. Probably that old bugaboo of procrastination and guilt. Cheryl did feel very guilty about her cancer, and was very aware that her putting off getting that mole removed may very well have ended up killing her.

Still, she improved quite a bit physically over the last couple of weeks. She was able to get up and down off the couch and up into bed without assistance, and her diet started to bounce back to normal. Wednesday night, in fact, we went out to the new Shari's restaurant and she ate half a hamburger and fries.

Thursday night, when my Beavers whupped on USC, she was on the couch, half asleep, I didn't think anything of it at the time. She was just tired, I thought, and she had her "button" (the BAD CADD that gave her her atavan and benadryl cocktail), so when she dedicded to sleep on the couch, I thought it a little unusual, but not that much.

Great, as I type, there's a commercial for The Amazing Race. Cheryl loved that show. We were going to send in an application tape once she got better.

She hadn't moved Friday morning, and I went to work anyway, again, thinking she was just tired. She never picked up her phone during the day, and that worried me, since she usually at least picks it up to say "I'm sleepy, call me back later."

When I got home I was apparent that she'd never gotten off the couch all day, and she was dehydrated and incoherent. She couldn't form complete sentences or finish a thought. I called 911 and we got Cheryl to Gritman hospital.

Again, this wasn't too different from previous incidents when she's spiked a fever; they'd blast her with antibiotics and fluids and she'd be back in a few days.

They wheeled Cheryl away for a CAT scan and shortly thereafter the doctor came back with the bad news: the tumors had moved to Cheryl's liver and brain and she was badly septic. They could do everything they could for her, but she wasn't leaving the hospital.

In retrospect, I perhaps should have seen this coming; there were a few times in the previous week where Cheryl would have trouble finding a word to finish a sentence, or she'd wake up from a dream spouting gibberish. The tumors were probably starting to move into her brain back then.

I called our families and told them to get up here as soon as possible and I stayed with Cheryl through the night. Vanessa, dear sweet Vanessa, came over to spend much of the night with me. Cheryl kept fighting her oxygen mask in her disorientation, and eventually had to go on a BiPAP machine to force air into her lungs. She would still say "I love you" when told her that I loved her, and some of her last coherent words to me were, when we had the Oregon/Washington State game on, I leaned over to her and said "Honey, your Ducks are up by 21," and she weakly said, but a hint of the humor I loved, "Oh, boy."

Shortly after the last of Cheryl's family arrived, they disconnected Cheryl from the BiPAP and resumed a regular oxygen line, and she slowly faded away. Her brother-in-law noted her pretty pink toes, the one girly thing she loved to do, and that she was still fighting to the end.

That's our Cheryl, tough and stubborn to the end.

We stroked her hair and held her hands and told her it was okay, that we loved her very, very much and we were so happy to have had her in our lives for even this brief time, that she was the most special person we had ever met. She was pretty drugged-up at this point but I hope she was able to absorb some of this.

And then she was gone.