One of my great dissapointments with life is that after-school specials aren't that far off the mark from the life one will actually lead. Friends really will die of drugs, alcohol and bad luck. Your parents may get divorced and may develop terminal diseases. And sometimes someone you love goes into a coma.
My cousin was driving down the highway and felt faint, thinking that she was having an asthma attack. She's a Hodgkins survivor, http://en.wikipedia.org/... lost her spleen and a significant part of her immune system to chemo, but she lived. In fact, terrible as it is to say, she was the only survivor of her Hodgkins support group. So she wasn't scared, she just pulled over with her two little dogs in the car and called 9-11. Two minutes later she passed out, and within minutes she went into cardiac arrest. It's a disease called Streptococcus pneumoniae, http://en.wikipedia.org/... and normally it can't compete with a human immune system. But her immune system was already compromised.
So she was found basically brain-dead. The disease left her lungs "bruised" and incapable of taking in oxygen. By the time they got her to the hospital they had to get through a number of procedures before they could cool her body and attempt to save her oxygen-starved brain. Neither the EEGs nor her autonomic responses have been promising.
I'm not mourning my cousin; she was a survivor, a fighter, and everyone who met her loved her. Especially tiny, demented little dogs. Despite her compromised immune system and lifetime of struggles, she worked as a teacher in a tough inner-city grade school, the kind that second graders threatened to kill her, and then tried to.
My family called her "cousin babble" because she'd show up late, talk into the wee hours of the morning with her menagerie of little pets, and then crash on a couch. I didn't realize until recently that she was twenty years my senior, her energy and beauty showed through so strongly.
My sister, a poet, says she was still wearing her make-up when she first saw her, and looked beautiful, which my cousin would have liked. But she also described her body as a burning house; no longer fit for the soul it carries. I think that's an apt description of the situation.
But she was tough, optimistic, and made a life out of it, not a tragedy. So I'm not going to mourn my cousin. And I'll always love her.
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