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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David kept showing up at Kim’s house. He took her to Sound Warehouse to buy tapes. He took her bowling. He took her to watch him race. While she sat nervously on the metal bleachers at DFW Speedway—“Oh, God,” she said to those around her, “he’s going to die!”—David would speed around the track; then, after the race, he would blow her a kiss. “What I’ll never forget,” Doug Kellum says, “is that he bought some new clothes to impress her. He once showed up at the hospital wearing black jeans and a black shirt open to the navel, and a blue-and-black shirt underneath that, and I was thinking, ‘Oh, man, where is that dude shopping?’ ”
Despite seemingly impossible circumstances, love bloomed. On November 17, 1989, after her usual diary entries about her friends’ deaths, Kim wrote: “Tonight, David and I went out to the picnic tables in back of the hospital and kissed for the first time … I have so many deep feelings for him because he is also my buddy, best friend, supporter, and he loves me as much as I him. God, please let this relationship work out. Love, Kim.”
“I think Kim realized this was going to be the last chance she had to experience love,” Dawn says. “I still thought it was a little crazy. I had all those motherly questions about how they could handle their finances and insurance if they got married and who would take care of them if they both got too sick to get out of bed. But one day the chaplain at Presbyterian told me, ‘Dawn, we don’t know how long they have on this earth. At least let them have it together.’ And I said, ‘You’re right.’ ”
On Kim and David’s wedding day, the church was filled with the sound of coughing, as Dallas’ CF community came out to see them vow to stay with each other in sickness and in health. “There was a beautiful eeriness to the moment,” says Kramer, who sat close to the front, next to six mothers who had buried their own cystic children. Ushers had two stools ready for Kim and David in case they needed to sit down. But as everyone later said, Kim had never looked healthier or more beautiful. The shoulder pads in her wedding dress gave her body a fuller look. Her complexion was even a little pink.
After checking into the local hotel where they spent their wedding night, David asked the bellman to carry their oxygen bottles up to their room. “We might need them,” he said with a confident grin, “in case we get too excited.”
They lived on their meager monthly disability checks. Their one-bedroom apartment resembled a hospital room: It was crammed with oxygen tanks and boxes of syringes and medicines, and the refrigerator was stocked with IV bottles. Domestic tasks were made difficult by their inability to get around like normals. They needed a day to clean the apartment and do the laundry. Kim was too weak to lift the mattress and change the sheets. At the grocery store, she shuffled slowly down the aisles, carrying her portable oxygen bottle with the tubes stuck up her nostrils. Once, after a butcher wouldn’t touch anything she had just touched, she told David they should print up a T-shirt that said, “We don’t have AIDS. We have CF.” By nighttime, they were exhausted. Kim would lie on the couch, while David would recline beside her in his easy chair.
Yet they kept insisting that they were happier than they ever could have imagined. He had nicknamed her Tigger (from the children’s book Winnie-the-Pooh) because of her red hair; she had nicked him Bear because he was cuddly. He was constantly buying her huge four-color Hallmark cards, the mushier the better. She, in turn, would write him long love letters (“We are going to conquer the unconquerable”). At times, David and Kim were a comically opposite couple. He would stack his racing trophies on a lamp table; she would replace them with wedding photos. He would say he wanted hamburgers and fish sticks; she would set the dining-room table with Waterford crystal and cook elaborate meals from her Helen Corbitt cookbook. But whenever they got into a spat—if David got mad at Kim for spending $50 on a haircut or if she got mad at him for spending money on race car parts—they made up by sending each other another round of lavish cards and letters.
To earn extra income, David worked rebuilding race cars at a neighborhood garage. He also enrolled at a junior college to get an accounting degree. One of his closest cystic friends, Richard Johnson, warned him it was impossible to keep up such a pace: “I said, ‘David, you know the disease will catch up to you.’ And David just said, ‘Well, I’ve got to do this for Kim. There isn’t anything in my life but her.’ ”
By 1992, however, Kim was taking a turn for the worse. She had been stuck with IV needles so many hundreds of times that her veins had collapsed. One of her lungs had collapsed as well. Her clogged digestive system was causing constant diarrhea. She was losing feeling in her fingers and toes and had begun to walk with even more of a staggering gait. Because her body was unable to absorb food, she was rapidly losing weight. She became ashamed to show herself in public. “Tigger,” David wrote her in a letter, “I love your body just the way it is. Your perfect body puts mine to shame! You are the most beautiful woman I know inside and out. I love you with all my heart and soul! Please believe me! Love always, Bear.”
David never left Kim’s side during her frequent trips to the hospital. At night, he slept on a cot in her room. Because she was so weak, he held the blow dryer to dry her hair. To entertain her, he wheeled her over to the hospital’s maternity ward so she could look at the newborn babies. If she wanted butterscotch candy in the middle of the night, he drove to a store and bought her some.
When Dawn would arrive on the third floor, wondering once again whether Kim would recover, Kim would always say, “I’m getting better.” Amazingly, her condition would improve, allowing her to return home for another few months. “She ought to be on American Gladiators,” David once told me. “She’s a fighter and a babe.”
But in early 1993 something changed: David’s cough. It was different, Kim realized. Previously muffled and listless, like the sound of two rocks being scraped together, David’s cough was growing louder and deeper. His face would turn purple; the veins in his neck would protrude. One afternoon, a nurse named Dana Thompson dropped by to see them. Kim was watching a soap opera while David sat quietly in his chair. Dana noticed that David didn’t tease her the way he usually did. He just kept staring at one of the actors on TV. Finally he blurted out, “I wish I was that handsome.”
“I said ‘David, you are handsome,’ ” Dana remembers. “But I looked at him again and I realized he was changing. His face was getting puffy from fluid retention. He used to lift weights, and now all the muscles in his arms were gone. Kim just gave me this sad look. And I thought to myself, ‘My God, my God, it’s David who’s going to die first.’ ”
David tried to assure Kim that there was nothing to worry about; he told her that he only needed to build his strength back up. As he pointed out, he had already stopped racing and quit his job at the machine shop. He was breathing with the assistance of a portable oxygen machine. What David neglected to mention was what Kramer had said after a recent checkup: The disease, which had been mostly dormant, had unexpectedly ambushed him. His lungs were becoming stiff with scar tissue. His bronchial tubes were closing up. His heart was not pumping enough oxygenated blood. If the assault continued, David would lose more and more oxygen and slowly start choking to death.
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