Halfway to forever by Karen Kingsbury

end, would not involve losing, but winning. Not just for Patsy and Leslie and
Grace.
But for the Bronzans as well.
313 0 my Tanner knew exactly how hard the treatment had
been on jade.
In two weeks she had lost fifteen pounds and most of
her hair. She vomited several times a day and was often too
exhausted to do anything more than make a short trip to the nursery
to see Madison.
Ty visited every afternoon, and jade made sure she had a scarf
around her head before he came. He had a hard enough time
understanding her cancer without watching her hair fall out.
Finally he'd brought her his Los Angeles Lakers baseball cap.
"Here, Mom." He helped position it over her balding head, pulling the sides down carefully over her ears.
"This way you'll have a part of me with you even when you sleep."
Jade had worn the hat every day since, even when the convulsions
in her stomach left her doubled over a bedpan for nearly
an hour.
They had arranged with their neighbor to watch Ty any time
that Tanner wasn't home. And since the second day of jade's treatment,
that had been almost constantly. He came home to sleep
and spend time with Ty, but only when jade insisted. At least four
times he'd stayed the night, holding her hand and pulling back
the thin clumps of hair that remained on her head so they
wouldn't fall in the bedpan.
For all the ways jade loved Tanner, the time they spent
together those two weeks raised her feelings to another level. By
letting him see her now, when death was pulling at her from every
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side, she had shown him everything there was to see, allowed him into every closet in her heart.
Tanner had seen her collapsed on the bathroom floor, clingheh wen she ing to the toilet, and he'd wiped
vomit mouth
C-sec was too exhausted to move. He applied ointment
tion incision and spoon-fed her when she was too weak to lift her kep bums on her hands. When she
needed to soothe radiation
washcloth face and neck, Tanner worked tirelessly to
cool.
He'd done all that, seen her at her
loved her more yet jade could tell by his touch that he had never
The days passed in a slow, sickening blur.
l they did do survive about the impending surgery when it was each day. The news was both good and
bad. While the tumor
hadn't grown tentacles-which would have made it very difficult
if not impossible to remove surgically-it had not shrunk nearly
as much as Dr. Layton hoped.
Because of that, and because the treatment was taking such a toll on jade, Dr. Layton decided tW g~ ahead