Lauren passed on Sunday, March 15th at 1:08PM in the emergency room of Logansport Memorial Hospital. The same hospital she was born in eighteen years ago. The minister who officiated at her funeral was at the hospital when she passed...the same minister who had baptized her years earlier.

I wish her passing had been easier for her. She struggled so. She was such a fighter.

Starting the night before, she was extremely restless and did not sleep. The next morning (Sunday), she seemed to be in pain. Because of the cancer in Lauren's liver, there was always the chance that her liver would eventually not metabolize the drugs effectively. Nevertheless, Dilaudid is all that we had, so we hit the bolus on the Dilaudid pump every 5 minutes to add another 55 ml per hit to the constantly flowing 100 ml per hour. Medicines were supposed to be on their way by hospice courier from Indianapolis. These medicines would put Lauren into a comatose-type state (no pain, no anxiety, no fear) until she passed.

At mid-morning we got the news that the drugs that we had been told were on their way had in fact not even been mixed in the pharmacy in Indianapolis. At that point, the hospice nurse began trying to make arrangements for Care Flight to take Lauren to Riley's Hospital for Children to receive these drugs. But Care Flight only flies critical patients whose lives are trying to be saved, not hospice patients in their final stages of life. So the nurse began trying to find an ambulance to take Lauren to a hospital 40 mintues away in Kokomo to get these medicines. In the midst of all of this, the Dilaudid pump failed. Dilaudid, the only medicine we had on hand.....medicine that we weren't sure was even working that well any longer.....had stopped flowing. Something akin to controlled chaos erupted in that apartment. My brother, my mother, Blake (Lauren's boyfriend), and the hospice nurse began working furiously to re-program the pump....to no avail. My brother then began injecting Fenegren into the central line in her stomach. Her Mom gave her Haldol (or Morphine) under her tongue. Her Mom called 911. Everything was being done to stave off what would be crushing breakthrough cancer pain. The ambulance came in minutes, but seemed to take forever leaving with her.

The hospital didn't have anywhere near the levels of Dilaudid in stock that Lauren consumed in an hour. The emergency room staff finally got another Dilaudid pump running and were quickly preparing her for the 45-60 minute ambulance ride to Riley to get the drugs needed to induce the comatose-state, when someone noticed that she had passed. Sometime in the midst of all the desperate and valiant efforts to help her..........she had passed. At some time while everyone was fighting to help her, she had helped herself.......she had stopped fighting.........she had let go.

Now that we have stopped long enough to think....in looking back, Lauren had become very still and calm right after the pump broke. Now that we think about it, she had stopped flinching, and grimacing, and clenching her fists. Her pain was already gone........her eyes were fixed......she was already floating....

Her funeral was on Wednesday, March 18th. The room was packed....a lot of young people from her high school.....and four staff members from Riley's Hospital for Children that had been her caregivers all of these years. They travelled two hours from Indianapolis after their shifts. Two of them had been with her during her first go-round with cancer while a still a baby. One of them spoke. Her oncology doctor had tried to come but could not make it. He sent a card that was read out loud. Lauren impacted a lot people.

Over the next few weeks, I am going to try to add two photo albums that we have of her.....a lot of fun, madcap photos of a beautiful girl who was a crazy, little free spirit.

I don't really know what else to say....except that we will all miss her. She was an amazing example of a person who lived life big. She was (is) our 'Buggy,' 'Bug Bug,' 'Twinkle Star,' 'Twinkle,' 'Twink,' 'Sweet Tart,' 'Tootsie Roll'.........and we will always love her.