Background

In order for me to feel like this story is complete, I must take you back to how our story began. Both my husband, Mike, and I grew up in Chewelah, a Northeastern Washington town of about 2000 people. We met in high school, shared the same circle of friends, and had Spanish and English classes together. Mike and I got stuck together as debate partners in English our junior year, having to debate in favor of the United States dropping the atomic bombs on Japan in World War 2. I rolled my eyes and told Mike to leave the project to me. I was a perfectionist in school, English was my favorite subject, and World War 2 was totally my thing. For days I did my research and the day of the debate I handed Mike a piece of paper and said, “Read this; this is your part.” He followed my directions and read it straight from the paper but I can’t remember if we won the debate or not. It’s not that Mike wasn’t smart, I just didn’t trust him because I knew he didn’t care as much about his grades as I did. It took Mike until he was a couple years into college to take school seriously. After we graduated high school, we parted ways. Mike went to Washington State University in Pullman, WA and I went to Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA where I shared a dorm room with my best friends, Ariel and Sheena. Mike and I occasionally emailed each other, and even went on a road trip together with another friend to Nelson B.C. during our spring break. There was never any romantic interest though, until that summer when we were both back home in Chewelah after our first year of college. One night we were at a mutual friend’s house and I was starving so Mike invited me to his parents’ house down the road to come get something to eat. It wasn’t hard for Mike to win me over. He fed me a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli and the rest is history. I think I stayed at his parents’ house pretty much every night the rest of the summer and we were inseparable. We both agreed this was nothing more than a casual summer romance and we’d assumed we would say our ‘goodbyes’ when school started back up. But our relationship was too perfect to call it quits. We both agreed there was no way we were letting a good thing get away from us. So for the next year we survived the long-distance relationship, visiting each other at our respective colleges every other weekend. Then, in the spring, Mike proposed in Seattle at the fountains by the Space Needle.

We both moved back to Spokane, got our beloved maltese/shitzu, Griffey, and got married in a fairytale-like wedding in Spokane in 2005 when we were just 21. I went to school at Eastern Washington University for a year and the community college for another year to get my prerequisite classes out of the way for pharmacy school, and Mike worked while I was in school. A year after we got married, Mike had a mole removed from the back of his calf. To our shock, it turned out to be melanoma. Considered stage 2B, it was rather deep and fast growing. But no cancer was found in Mike’s lymph nodes so the doctors gave him a clean bill of health. Besides a nasty scar from surgery, we were left with a sense of gratitude that Mike escaped the snares of what can be a very deadly cancer. Then after I was accepted into the Washington State University Pharmacy program, we moved to Pullman and Mike completed his degree in Kinesiology (Exercise Physiology) while I got through my first two years of pharmacy school. We finally moved back to Spokane for my last two years of pharmacy school where I completed the rest of the program. I graduated in 2010 and worked as a retail pharmacist full time. Over the years since graduating high school, Mike had changed his education ambitions back and forth from pharmacy to wildlife biology to physical therapy to finally settling on physician assistant school. After being rejected from a number of highly competitive physician assistant programs in 2010, Mike gained a year of hands-on experience as an EMT for a rural ambulance and then finally landed himself a spot in the University of Washington’s highly regarded physician assistant program at the Spokane campus.

We could not have been happier. This was Mike’s dream school. Not only had he been an obsessive University of Washington Husky fan all of his life, the program was in Spokane so we wouldn’t have to move. In the early spring of 2011, Mike started the early curriculum for the PA program, which consisted of some online Anatomy and Physiology refresher courses to complete until classes on campus began. We found a quaint house on a park in a great neighborhood and made an offer. Life could not have been better. Everything we wanted had fallen into place. We had just a few weeks to close on the new house when Mike started having flu-like symptoms that just wouldn’t go away. Each day I would pray he’d feel a little better and show signs of improvement, but after two weeks of nausea, pain, and fevers, a knot settled in my stomach and deep down, I knew something wasn’t right. I would lie awake at night, Mike asleep next to me, with tears streaming down my face, trying to be quiet so I wouldn’t wake him up and my fear wouldn’t scare him. I can remember doing my makeup and hair one morning before work, which I consider my quiet time to think, and with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, thinking to myself, I should still buy the house even if Mike dies, because at least I’ll have somewhere for Griffey and I to go. A vision of coming home after work to the house we were buying at the park flashed through my mind. I imagined coming home to the empty and quiet house after taking Griffey for a lonely walk in the park. Although I was disgusted by my morbid imagination, I couldn’t shake those thoughts from my mind. I was already preparing myself for the worst, because somehow, deep down, I just knew.

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