Best friends Heidi Walker and Nancy Kendall share stories of amazing coincidences
Taking a break from their thick nursing textbooks, Nancy Kendall and Heidi Walker describe a friendship brimming with coincidences. As they speak, they frequently burst into laughter. They also shed quiet tears. Now in their second year of Victor Valley College's nursing program, they met just over a year ago, early in their first semester. "We were walking beside each other," Walker recalls, "and we both started giggling - giggling from the stresses of nursing school." They felt an instant trust and soon learned they shared an interest in horses. "But our stories came out little by little," Kendall says, "little by little because we didn't want to hurt each other." One day, however, the women shared their greatest heartbreaks: Kendall's loss of her 8-year-old daughter and Walker's loss of her 42-year-old mother. Their conversation went something like this: Kendall: "My daughter Jessie passed away in 1993." Walker: "Really? So did my mother. In what month?" Kendall: "March." Walker: "My mom died in March, too, on the 18th." Kendall: "Jessie died on the 18th." Walker: "Did Jessie pass in the morning?" Kendall: "Yes. I remember looking out of the hospital window and watching the Life-Flight helicopter land on the roof. I also remember thinking, someone else is having as bad a day as I am." Walker: "My mom was the patient on that flight." At that moment, Walker says, they knew they were meant to be lifelong friends: "We also felt in our hearts that Nancy's daughter and my mom would be together forever. "We don't think it's coincidence." Walker's mother, Kira Larson, had been in a car accident on Camp Rock Road in Lucerne Valley and transported to Loma Linda University Hospital, where after a battle of five months and two weeks, Jessie Kendall was dying of aplastic anemia, a rare condition characterized by defective function of the bloodforming organs (e.g., the bone marrow). As a result, people with the disease have lower counts of all three blood-cell types: red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets. According to the Aplastic Anemia Foundation, the disease is "caused by toxic agents, as chemicals or X rays, or is idiopathic in origin (i.e., has no known
cause)."
One Monday in October 1992, Jessie, an athletic girl passionate about horses and gymnastics, fell in the school playground, scraping her hand.
"I cleaned her hand," Nancy Kendall recalls, "but the next day she had 64 bruises all over her body. They were petechiae (pinpoint-sized, red dots beneath the surface of the skin, caused by the leaking of blood vessels).
"On Wednesday night, we went on our last horseback ride together. The next day, Jessie had her blood drawn, was diagnosed with aplastic anemia and driven immediately to Loma Linda."
Because Jessie was immunecompromised, she and everyone around her had to wear masks.
"On outings," Nancy Kendall says, "I told her, `If some idiot asks you why you're wearing a mask, say, "So I won't get your germs." '
"I also told her that she could stick her tongue out and nobody would notice."
In yet another coincidence, while waitressing at the Cocky Bull, Kendall met a man from back East who was going through a divorce and temporarily living in his truck, so Kendall and her husband, Dave, invited him to stay at their ranch in Oak Hills.
Later the man became Jessie's major donor of platelets, since they both had O-negative blood.
"I wasn't open about death," Kendall says, "so I never knew what Jessie thought of death and dying.
"But a lot of kids at Loma Linda, kids who'd had a disease a long time, did understand about death and wanted to be in control of giving away their belongings."
Only last week did Dave Kendall tell his wife that he and Jessie had discussed death:
"Dave said he was holding her, and they were both crying, and Jessie said, `Dad, whatever you do, don't let me suffer. Let me die.' "
Nancy Kendall says she never lost hope that her daughter would make it, but by March 18, 1993, Jessie was essentially bleeding to death:
"When it came time to decide whether to continue life support or not, Dave said, `Don't hate me for what I'm going to do.'
"I said, `Don't hate me for being a coward.'
"Dave's decision was the bravest thing I have ever seen."
Walker, who lives in Lucerne Valley with her husband, Wade, their son Kyle, 17, and their daughter, Kalina, 14, says that her mother died on her and Wade's wedding anniversary, "20 years after my dad died in a motorcycle accident.
"He died when my mom was pregnant with me. So because my mom was my only connection to my dad, when she died, he did, too.
"I never saw my mother before she died, so I had no closure. Closure is so important." Asked how they chose to become nurses, Walker says, "My dad was a medic in Vietnam. I'd always wanted to be a nurse."
But Kendall, who'd been s t u dy i n g t o b e a n X - r ay technician, says, "After Jessie passed away, I hated the medical field. For three years I was so consumed with grief, I almost lived in the cemetery. I even brought a sleeping bag."
Kendall finally had what she calls her "awakening" when her other daughter, Jami, who was 12 when Jessie died, turned 15: "I realized I had a teenage daughter who needed my attention."
Having weaned herself from the cemetery and earned her prerequisites Kendall enrolled in VVC's nursing program.
"Before my pediatric rotation at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center, I was terrified," she says. "But the minute I hit the unit, I heard a little girl crying, and I knew that she was the patient assigned to me.
"The girl was afraid of having blood drawn. I held the mom's face with both my hands and said, `You kiss her!'
"Then I told the girl, `You scream as loud as you want, just don't wiggle.' "
Looking fondly at her friend, Walker says: " To lose a child and yet go on, to get out of bed in the morning and go out to help others..."
Then she adds: "People say a nurse shouldn't tear up in front of a patient's family, but I disagree. When my skin gets to be so thick that I don't tear, I'll know that I am finished as a nurse."