Connected to the Web of Life

At 3 a.m. in a dimly lit room at City of Hope Cancer Center, Kim Megonigal sat looking at his wife, now asleep, her gentle face belying all the pain and anguish from months of cancer therapy.

In all his exhaustion, he turned on his laptop computer, as he had so many previous nights in their long hospital stay. He thought of the previous day--Katy’s deteriorating health, visits from old friends, brave smiles from their three teenage children. Tears welling, he composed his journal, and as he sent his e-mail that May morning, he felt relief coursing through his tense and fatigued body.

Today some of our longtime friends came by to say their best wishes to Katy. . . . This was the first time that I have seen her shaken and frightened and it took everything I had inside of me to not break down and have her lose faith that she would be OK. . . . Tonight Katy is sleeping here next to me. I have medicated her so she will sleep and not feel any discomfort. . . . Goodnight. Kim & Katy.

Katy and Kim Megonigal could never have imagined the intimacy of e-mail when they left their Irvine home early this year and moved into City of Hope in Duarte to treat a recurrence of Hodgkin’s disease. At first, e-mail seemed to them a convenient, if somewhat mechanical, way of telling people what was going on instead of trying to return every phone call.

“Telephone calls were intrusive. People would call at the wrong times,” Kim Megonigal, 47, would later say. “The doctors would be there, or she’d be sleeping.”

Their e-mails initially went out to a small circle of friends and relatives. But as Katy’s battle for survival--and her hospital stay--extended into weeks and months, with long stretches where she could not have visitors, the message loop grew to at least 200 people, who in turn would e-mail back, opening a window to a lively world to which Katy and Kim yearned to return.

The days seem to be getting longer for Katy. She is tired of TV and has trouble concentrating enough to read. . . . The kids have started to e-mail their mother a daily diary of their activities which she just loves, and the e-mails about what you are up to have been very enjoyable to her. Yesterday we received 50 e-mails and it took me over 2 hours to read them to her. She loved it.

Katy Winters Megonigal, a slender, athletic woman with big brown eyes and a radiant smile, was almost 49 when she learned in May 1998 that she had Hodgkin’s lymphoma--a rare cancer that causes abnormal cells to proliferate in the lymph nodes. Ten years earlier, she had had melanoma, but the skin cancer on her shoulder was surgically removed, and she had resumed a vigorous life, running several miles a day and absorbing herself in the PTA and local charities.

At the time of the lymphoma diagnosis, Katy’s doctors saw a strong chance of cure--not uncommon today for this cancer because of advances in treatment. And after six cycles of chemotherapy, then radiation every day for a month, Katy showed a very favorable response. By this time last year, Katy and Kim and a few close friends had celebrated her progress by popping open champagne in their house, adorned with Christmas lights and Katy’s angel collection.

But just days later, Katy Megonigal found that the tumor just above her sternum had returned--and it was horrifyingly bigger, the size of a plum. More radiation and high-dose chemotherapy followed, shrinking the mass but also destroying her bone marrow, leaving her defenseless against germs. Her body temperature soared, and she developed sores in her mouth and stomach. To restore the bone marrow’s ability to produce infection-fighting white-blood cells, she needed a stem cell transplant. It would be the last treatment, the Megonigals thought, before they could go home.

But even after the stem-cell transfer, it was apparent that something was wrong. Katy’s white blood count slowly increased, but her fever didn’t lift. Her breathing became heavy. She had double pneumonia and fluid in her lungs.

As she moved in and out of intensive care, Kim lingered in the hospital, waiting for times when he could see Katy. During anxious moments, he rode his Harley-Davidson along the San Gabriel foothills. And he had one other outlet: e-mail.

He wrote down his fears and hopes. And as with medicine, which Kim administered when Katy felt pain, he also read e-mail at her bedside to calm her, to entertain and to inform. He read verses from Psalms and other inspirational messages, and news of their children that neighbors passed on--what Megan, now 17, wore to a social; how Tommy, 15, and Murphy, 13, did on their school volleyball team.

Keep those e-mails coming. It has been wonderful catching up on the outside world and it makes our captivity a little easier to tolerate. We both have cabin fever.

Margaret Bauer, a close friend who lived just two blocks down from the Megonigals, was used to talking to Katy almost every day since they met 10 years ago when they began carpooling their children. When Katy could not chat over the phone in the hospital, Bauer remembers the emptiness, so she too turned to e-mailing and found it therapeutic.

One day, Bauer wrote Katy about the drudgery of cleaning house, doing the wash and running carpools all afternoon. “I’m not complaining,” Bauer said at the end of her long e-mail. “I know that you’d love to be doing that instead of sitting up in that room.”

Katy and Kim did not usually respond to e-mails individually, but their daily updates touched people in a very personal way, and many on the loop forwarded the e-mails to friends around the country and to England and Australia.

“It made me feel so special,” said Carolyn McInerney, whose 17-year-old daughter, Kate, often shared the Megonigal updates with worried classmates when Megan Megonigal was absent from school.

On May 13, hope sprang from Kim’s e-mail describing how he and Katy had spent the previous day, her 50th birthday.

Katy had a wonderful birthday and a great trip out for an hour. . . . We drove around the homes in the foothills in Arcadia and Sierra Madre. The area has old large trees and beautiful landscaping. Plus all the flowers are in bloom which made her feel just great.

But the next day, Katy was fighting even harder for her life. A CAT scan revealed severe damage to the lungs. Less than a week later, Kim described an especially memorable visit from old friends.

The highlight of my day was when one of my dearest and closest friends, John Evans, who lost his 16-year-old son to an accident and didn’t ever get to say good-bye because he was killed instantly, asked me if maybe it would be all right to ask Katy to give him a message in heaven for him.

The next day brought this e-mail:

Katy opened her eyes this morning, looked me straight in the eye and said in a loud voice, “I’m still here, come love me.” Next she said, “Yippee, yippee, yippee,” and now she is singing “Happy Days” in a slow mumble.

Stacey Kradel, who had raised her kids alongside Katy’s, found much comfort in the e-mail updates. In that final week at the hospital, Kradel visited every night, up to the last when Katy was heavily sedated and her liver failed. Doctors told Kim and Kradel and others that night that Katy had less than 12 hours.

Early next morning, Kradel woke up in her Irvine home and turned on her personal computer. “I remember that morning, seeing no message and just waiting and waiting.” Then an e-mail from Kim flashed. Breaking down in tears, she read his words:

At 1:25 a.m. Friday May 21, Katy made her flight to heaven.