If you have a couple spare minutes today, take the time and read article from the New York Times.
Yow has persevered even though the disease has spread to her skeleton and liver, and she knows that it will probably become fatal. The cancer treatment has left her feeling weak, dehydrated, short of breath, lacking in appetite. Once an avid golfer, now she longs just to take a walk. The other day, it took her 50 minutes to finish a bowl of oatmeal. Always the coach, she timed it.
Food tastes metallic, everything a meal of coins. She has lost her hair, her eyebrows, her eyelashes. A rim of tears persists on her lower lids, and she must dab them frequently with tissues. Her toes feel numb. Her face and her hands have grown as dark as a July tan. Sores irritate her mouth. She is beginning to lose her fingernails, which are spotted brown and pop up like the hoods of cars.
But she had to be with her players. She has never married, and during her 32 years at North Carolina State her team has essentially become her family. Her devotion to the university is evident everywhere in her town house, which is on a golf course in Cary, N.C. Figurines of wolves decorate her mantle and her bookcase. The school logo is burnished on her welcome mat, on stained-glass artwork abutting her fireplace, on the cover of her barbecue pit.
