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Cooking
sooz_gw

I've been crying all week

sooz
13 years ago

My BFF Corine passed away this week. She and I would always go out to our favorite local sushi restaurant, and I'd post photos on the Cooking forum of the food. We tried to celebrate all this year with lunch out because it was my first year being retired. She'd been retired for a few years already.

Corine and I go way back to 1975 when we both ended up working at the same school, we're both October babies who majored in English, she was a bridesmaid in my wedding, and even when my program was moved to a different high school and then I was switched to the MH Program, we continued our friendship and she was the speechie for my program. Corine always had some problems with asthma but meds took care of that pretty well. She had breast cancer, a double mastectomy and follow up chemo, and was looking forward to celebrating her 5-year anniversary of being cancer-free this October.

On May 18, she was having problems breathing (asthma) and ended up in ER. They released her but on the 19th, she was in ER again, and they admitted her and ran some tests because she couldn't breathe right and she was really tired and just wanted to sleep.

The doctors told her she had leukemia. That threw us all for a loop, but she was positive as always, and said she'd like to get another 5 years out of it. The docs said it was treatable, so she was back on some kind of chemo but they wouldn't release her from the hospital yet.

Then, earlier this week, she was having problems breathing again, took off her "face" oxygen mask to use the bathroom, and had a stroke. They did a CT scan and it showed that it was a small stroke. It affected a bit of her sentences, but she was oriented fine to the baseball game on TV and to the guys up at bat and communicated in short words/phrases. She was going to have a MRI later that evening. Coe ended up in ICU and took a bad turn with her oxygen levels, and they had tubes going in and out of her, including a tube down her throat for breathing and she was well medicated against that discomfort. We all thought once things got better and she was more stabilized with her breathing, they'd take out the tube.

Her MRI came back showing multiple lesions on her brain. She went from bad to worse and I guess the docs said there was no coming back from this. Her life partner of 33 years, and her sister, were there when they pulled out the breathing tube, and within 30 minutes, she was gone.

I still can't believe it. It just doesn't seem possible. I find myself picking up the phone to call her, or telling myself oh, I'll have to tell this to Coe, or thinking that we better set up some time for lunch this month.

I know most of us have lost someone dear to us, and I know that as time passes, I'll handle the grief better, but for now, it's rough. I'm asking you to please hold a good thought and keep all of us who loved her in your prayers. She was a wonderful, remarkable, supportive, encouraging and loving friend and I'll miss her dearly every day of my life.

Comments (37)

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