Love and Death on the Third Floor
On the cystic fibrosis wing of Dallas’ Presbyterian Hospital, an unlikely romance bloomed between two sick patients. The outcome was inevitable.
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But then came the days when Kim’s body seemed to deflate, just like a rubber toy with a hole in it, and Dawn would return her to the hospital, wondering if this time she would be too sick to recover. The routine became all too familiar: a few months of remission followed by a trip to the CF wing. Kim always brought along her stuffed animals, her favorite pink blanket, and her diary. As the children in the rooms around her would die, one by one, Kim would write down her impressions (“Wendy Winkles died at 8:10 this morning! She suffered all night. It’s better this way. Poor little thing”). “Kim was always so optimistic, so willing to smile,” Dawn says. “I think the diary was her way of preparing herself for what she knew would someday happen to her.”
For a while, Kim did what she could to be like the “normals” (her nickname for kids without CF). In high school, she made A’s and B’s and always dressed superbly, wearing tea-length dresses to hide her spindly legs. If classmates asked why she had coughing spells, she would say she was suffering from asthma. In her Ford Mustang, she would pick up other cystic girls who were strong enough to leave their houses and drive up and down Forest Lane, the North Dallas teenage drag, honking her horn and waving at boys. Because she looked so healthy through the car window—she had a jubilant grin that spread completely across her face—high school boys were always trying to get her phone number. Still, she could not ignore the reality of her life. She noticed that people looked twice at her thin body and narrow feet. Her digestive system was so clogged with mucus that she suffered painful attacks of diarrhea. (During a date to a church party with a Texas A&M student—the first college boy to ask her out, she excitedly told her friends—she had an “accident” and rushed home in tears.) To make matters worse, she developed a neurological disorder, which affected her balance and distorted her perception. On two occasions, she lost control of her car, driving it onto the median. Sometimes she listed sideways as she walked down a school hallway, collapsing into the lockers. Finally, during her senior year, she grew so weak that she had to stop attending classes and finish her course work at home. Just as her mother feared, she never got to go to a high school dance. In perhaps her lowest moment, Kim asked that her picture not be shown in the 1987 high school annual. “I look like one of those starvation victims,” she said.
Kim became so despondent that Kramer recommended she see a psychiatrist. She also stopped speaking to her younger brother and sister (twins who were adopted because her mother did not want to risk giving birth to another CF child). Over and over, she watched a videotape of The Blue Lagoon, the story of an adolescent boy and girl who are stranded on an island and fall in love. After Dawn and Bill Marshall divorced—a common occurrence among CF parents, whose relationships often break under the pressure of caring for their children—Kim went through a rebellious streak. She began smoking cigarettes, two packs of Marlboros a night, even though she knew the smoke would harm her already weak lungs. After wrecking her car, she would sneak her mother’s car out at night, racing it up and down Forest Lane or the Dallas North Tollway.
One night, at the end of her rope, Dawn finally screamed, “What is the matter with you? Why are you trying to destroy yourself?” Kim buried her face in her hands and began to sob. “You know what’s the matter,” she said. “I have no life. You know I’ll never have a life.”
Dawn, who always tried to have a soothing answer for her daughter, for once couldn’t think of anything to say.
For two years he stared at her. He would walk past her door, working up the courage to pop in and say hello. Kim would look at him in his tennis shoes, his blue jeans, and his white T-shirt, his eyeglasses held together by a piece of tape, and with a brief smile she would go back to reading her book.
Undaunted, David Crenshaw called his cousin Larry. “Larry,” he said, “she’s good lookin’. I mean good lookin’.”
Loud, robust, and hefty (his size-36 waist was gargantuan for a cystic), David was something of a legend on the third floor. No one had ever heard of a cystic doing the things he did—winning, for instance, DFW Speedway’s 1986 rookie-of-the-year honors in the midget racer division. “Our goal was to raise him as if he weren’t sick,” says David’s father, Big David Crenshaw, a manufacturing coordinator at Texas Instruments who acted as his son’s crew chief during the dirt-track races. “Maybe I just didn’t want to admit he had a disease. Maybe I thought if he stayed tough enough, he could beat it.”
In truth, except for a bout with pneumonia early in his childhood, David never did act particularly sick. He was more of a prankster, a cystic version of Randle P. McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In the third-floor hallway, he conducted wheelchair races and tomato-throwing competitions (using the tiny cherry tomatoes that adorned hospital food trays). He led an expedition of fellow cystics up the back stairs to the fourth floor, where they stared through a glass window at the patients in the psychiatric ward. One night, in 32-degree weather, he took some cystics to a go-cart track. “He had this damned sense of immortality about him,” Kramer remembers. “I’d get so pissed off when he’d work around those hot rods and in those garages. I’d say, ‘David, here I am trying to save your life and you’re out killing yourself.’ Just to irritate me, he’d give me this grin and say something ungrammatical like, ‘Oh, Doc, I ain’t hurting a bit.’ ”
About the only time David fell silent was when he saw Kim. “He was her secret admirer,” Kellum says. “It was sort of sweet. When she was in the hospital and he was at home, he’d call me to find out how she was doing. He was always looking after her—even when she wouldn’t give him the time of day.”
For months and months, David waited patiently as Kim was courted by other third-floor boys: blond-haired boys, sophisticated boys, richer boys. In late 1988, Kim began an on-again-off-again relationship with David’s close friend Steve, a hip CF patient who was the first male on the wing to get an earring. “I knew it wasn’t going to work out,” a cocky David told me. “They were afraid of commitment.” Indeed, as that relationship faltered, David took Kim aside and said, “Steve isn’t treating you right. You need something better in your life.”
Early in the fall of 1989, when he and Kim were out of the hospital, David made his move: He called her at home and asked her to dinner. Although she said no, David declared, “I’ll be there at eight p.m., no buts about it,” and then hung up. Horrified, Kim brought along Petri Brill, the daughter of a successful real estate appraiser her mother was about to marry. Kim made Petri sit with David in the front seat of his two-door 1972 Chevelle hardtop; she sat in the back, refusing to speak. She also remained silent throughout dinner and gave David a tortured look when he suggested they go dancing at a nightclub. When he took her home, Kim leapt out of the car, ran to her room, and shut the door. “She had always told me she didn’t like David, because he was too sarcastic and chauvinistic,” Petri recalls. “I mean, she was the princess and he was the middle-class guy with dirt under his fingernails. Still, I could just tell it was going to work.”
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