(Editor’s note: This blog post is a companion piece to a story on the UNC Health Care website, which you can read here.)
Elizabeth Swaringen wrote this …
Crystal Sharpe, at left, and her mother, Patricia Sanders.
When I called to set up the face-to-face interview with Crystal Sharpe and her mother, Patricia Sanders, it was Patricia’s number I dialed, and she was ready for the interview then – at Crystal’s bedside. I sensed I was dealing with a natural storyteller, and Patricia didn’t disappoint. Her description of the fundraiser for Crystal was so vivid, I could almost taste the chicken leg quarters her brother cooked and the boiled potatoes and string beans. And when she told me that she told her brother she didn’t know what he’d done to that chicken but “you must have flown that heart in there,” I don’t know who was cackling harder, Patricia or me.
Crystal Sharpe
And yet again with this story there was evidence that life works in strange and mysterious ways. Patricia was working a job assembling gas pumps, but the job ended without much notice in February 2009, just after Crystal went on dialysis. About the same time, Patricia’s brother, was diagnosed with cancer. Although no longer employed for pay, Patricia had two full-time jobs caring for two near-and-dear family members who were seriously ill, in addition to being a devoted sister, a wife, a mother to two other children, and a grandmother. Caring for her family is a labor of love Patricia never regrets.
After I interviewed Patricia for about 45 minutes, she put Crystal on the phone. The first thing I “heard” was the smile. I wouldn’t see it with my own eyes until a few weeks later when she returned to UNC for a routine heart biopsy. When the petite, stylish woman rounded the corner, the smile gave her away.
