The Final Post

For those of you who have followed Vickie's battle with cancer for the last three years I have heartbreaking news. Vickie lost her battle this morning at 11:55 a.m.

Vickie's pain got better, but as it did her weakness and confusion got worse and she developed terrible mouth sores -- so bad she could not eat or drink more than a few small swallows a day. Wednesday she called Dr. Brooks and he said for her to go in and take a shot, and to keep coming in for shots for the next four days, until Saturday. The shot was supposed to raise her blood count and maker her feel better, and it usually works. She took the shot, but they also did labs. As expected, her counts were low. She went back in Thursday and then Friday.

By Friday morning I was very concerned because Vickie wasn't getting better, and told her I might ask the doctor to hospitalize her. She didn't want me to, but I made no promises. She had been scheduled for labs Friday anyway, so they gave her the shot and drew the labs and we waited for the results. When the nurse saw the results she called Dr. Brooks, who came down to the infusion lab to see Vickie. When Dr. Brooks saw the sores and the blood counts he admitted her to the hospital immediately, taking the decision out of my hands.

Saturday morning Vickie was still weak, but after a night of fluids and antibiotics the doctor saw small improvement in her mouth sores and she was completely lucid and able to focus for the first time in days. Everyone thought she was improving, though slowly.

Saturday afternoon about 2:00 or 2:30 p.m. I was in the room alone with Vickie and noticed a change in her breathing, which became faster, shallower and more labored. Shortly after that she was hallucinating or dreaming and waving her hands around, something she normally never does. Within a few minutes she asked me to help her to the restroom and I noticed that she was much weaker than before. When I got her back to bed I asked if she was feeling worse and she nodded yes.

I immediately called the nurse to come look at her. They took her temperature. About two hours earlier her temp had been 97.?. Now it was 100.?. They called Dr. Brooks and he came to see her within a much shorter time than I expected. After checking her over he called in a critical care/lung specialist and an infectious disease specialist. After checking her over some more and conferring, they moved her to ICU.

Dr. Wait, the critical care specialist, then became her main doctor. She told me I could expect Vickie to get worse before she got better, but said that while there were no guarantees, Vickie should improve. They gave her more antibiotics and put her on life support, so her body would not have to labor to support itself and fight off the infection at the same time, because she was too weak to do both. Dr. Wait said Vickie would be in ICU for two to three weeks, if everything went well.

Through the night things seemed to be going pretty much as expected. By this time I had been up about a day and a half. I called some of the family and told them I needed some help as someone needed to be with Vickie. They made plans accordingly and Tony drove up through the night, arriving about 5:15 a.m. on Sunday morning. After talking with him for a while, I left the hospital and drove home to get some sleep.

Tony called me about 9:30a.m. and told me that the doctors had told him Vickie had turned for the worse and nothing was working and that I needed to come back up to the hospital. I arrived in less than an hour and met with Dr. Wait. She told me that Vickie had turned worse in the early morning and that, while she had a few more tricks up her sleeve, it didn't look good. We discussed how far I wanted the treatment to go. I told her that she would have to make the medical decisions as to what might work, but as long as there was reasonable hope to proceed, and when there was not to tell me and we would stop.

They made several further efforts, calling in a kidney/critical care specialist to see if dialysis would help. He checked her over and found there was swelling of the brain and after a discussion between the four doctors involved, it was decided that the point had been reached where nothing would work. I was involved in most of this conversation, though they stepped outside to work through some details and arrive at their final consensus. They came back inside the room and told me their consensus and I made the decision to stop action and remove life support. This was the absolute right decision as is was something Vickie and I had discussed often in the past. Within five minutes, she was gone.

Vickie would want me to say here how hard the doctors tried to save her life. They did everything they could do and told me they would not stop until I was ready for them to stop. They were exemplary both technically and personally.

Not long before Vickie passed away the final blood cultures and scan results came back. The scan showed there was a huge tumor near her appendix and the doctors now believe the cancer was probably widespread in her body, including in her bones. This set off a pair of infections, one of which was very resistant to treatment. The combination of the exceedingly aggressive cancer and the infections overcame her body and was what finally brought her down.

It is perhaps gratuitous for a husband to praise his wife, so let me just say here that there is hardly a person who knew her who doesn't feel better for having done so and worse for having lost her. She was truly one of a kind and I was the luckiest man on earth to share her life and her love for thirty-eight years.