My copy editors at the Kennebec Journal
and Morning Sentinel were absolute in their insistence that when
people are no longer among the living, they are dead. Not passed
away, passed over, gone to be with the Lord. Dead. And I pretty much
agree, and it isn't meant to be as harsh as it might sound.
But my friend Cindy... she passed away.
We both had stem cell transplants, hers
was done a short time before mine. There are two basic types of stem
cell transplants: autologous, which uses the patients own stem cells;
and allogenic where they come from a brother, sister or parent,
though they may come from an unrelated donor as well if they meet a
set of strict criteria. I had the former, and Cindy the latter, her
cells provided by a donor in Germany. Because of how so many cities
in Maine are named, I should point out that he is from
Germany...Germany, not Germany in Aroostook.
Though they were used against different
diseases- she had leukemia and I have multiple myeloma- there were a
lot of similarities in what we were going through.
Now, I'm not good at talking to people
I don't know very well, and certainly not about something like this.
But her brother, who lives in Clinton, insisted both Cindy and I
would benefit from talking to each other. I dragged my feet, called a
couple of times, but it was not going well. Her brother simply would
not let up... at all. Oy. But, thankfully, once we realized we both
preferred to use email- problem solved, relationship begun.
From the day of our first email in the
fall of 2013 until our last in early December of this year, we shared
just about everything that related to our health. When we were
afraid, we told each other so and if it meant crying together, we
did. We also laughed at the absurdity of our situations. We used a
few curse words here and there (her more than me- just sayin') and
didn't shy away from the seriousness of our illnesses. She told me
how much she loved her doctors and nursing staff and I told her how
much I loved mine, As a nurse herself, she allowed she may have been
a “little” difficult as a patient in the beginning, but quickly
learned to let them do their job.
As we settled into the longer-term care
for our illnesses, our paths started to diverge somewhat. My results
were very good, right from the start. Hers were initially
encouraging, but didn't stay that way. She was home for a short
period of time, but constant infections forced her back into the
hospital. She had numerous transplants in an effort to get her bone
marrow to start growing again. It had been destroyed at one point,
but, unlike my own, it wasn't responding to treatment. She had no
white blood cells and despite numerous attempts, they would not
return.
At the same time, she was suffering
infection after infection, and the decision was eventually made to
let her go home. She wasn't going to get better and she deserved to
be where she could see her beloved cats, and her gardens, and all the
things that made up the life she and her husband had carved out for
each other.
I continued to send her emails, though
I knew she didn't have the strength to reply. But I wanted her to
know that I still cared for her and was still thinking about her, and
frankly, I didn't want to give up the connection. So the emails were
chit-chatty and needed no reply. But as her conditioned worsened, it
seemed like dealing with them would have been just another burden on
her family. So I stopped.
Then her brother sent me the message
that she had passed away at 5 am., quietly and in peace. Amen.
I have to tell you- we lost a shining
light when this woman left us. The light was fueled by unimaginable
courage. So many of you have talked about the courage you see in my
writing, and I thank you for it. I look at Cindy and thank her for
the courage she showed me, some of which I hope to be able to pass on
to you.
The other huge thing I saw in her was
her love for her family. The last days of her fight were for them, I
think. It would have been so much easier to just let go, but there
was no way that could happen. She wanted to give her family every
minute with her that she possibly could, and she did.
She was as important to me and my
recovery as anyone, except my wife, Sheri. I find myself sad at the
end of each day now, because that was the time I gathered up the bits
and pieces to put in my email to her for the day. I guess I'll stop
doing that soon enough.
So, I've lost one more
person who has been very important to me and I am certainly
diminished by the loss. Oh... Did I tell you that I never met Cindy?
Never. We made numerous plans for when she was well enough to come up
here to see her brother, but the one time she was able to, she had
way too many other things to do, so we settled on the next time.
Sheri and I also offered to stop by the hospital when we were in
Boston for one of my own checkups, but she asked us not to, and I
certainly understood that.
Goodbye, Cindy.
There are a variety of
versions of the story that gives this blog its name. The pony is the
constant in all of them. A man is on his way to a party when he comes
across a young boy shoveling ass over tea kettle at an enormous
mountain of manure. The man asks the child if he wouldn't rather go
with him to the party than shovel all that poop. The kid says, “No
way man. With all that poop... there must be a pony in there
somewhere.”
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