Mindy's Story Let me tell you a little about Mindy and her story. Mindy loved sports. She played basketball, baseball and swimming while in middle school. Mindy was an honor student and in all kinds of clubs. She played piano, violin and briefly the guitar. She also loved singing and sang in church. Mindy’s real love was for animals. She once saw a squirrel that was acting sick. So of course she’s going to help it!! She captured this squirrel and tried to feed it, put it in a warm cage hoping whatever was wrong it would get better. Of course the squirrel bit her and she had to have a tetanus shot. We had to send squirrel to Atlanta to have it tested. Another time she saw a baby deer in a ditch that had been hit by a car. Yes, she loaded that baby in her truck and brought it home to see if she could find help for it. It looked like the deer’s leg was broke. Mindy called and called the wildlife reserve to come help this baby. She stayed up all night with this deer trying to feed it with a baby bottle. The wildlife people never came and the deer died. This upset Mindy so much. She was also forever rescuing turtles out of the streets. She’d stop and either help them cross the street (if there were woods near) or bring them home and set free in our backyard and woods. Mindy was healthy until she got sick when she was fifteen years old. Doctors said she had Cushing’s disease. She had two brain surgeries within one month. Her last surgery the doctors took out 75 percent of her pituitary gland trying to find the tumor that causes this disease. I won’t go into detail of all she went through, it was awful. She finally recovered from the surgeries and never fully bounced back. Mindy, who always loved school now had a hard time at school. She did keep her love for animals. But now her immune system was very, very low. She was on several meds. But stayed reasonably healthy. Anyway the last time she got sick. I thought she had a virus that was going around but after two days and she wasn’t getting better my husband took her to the doctor. He only said to take Tylenol and it was a virus. This was a Wednesday. By Friday I was thinking, she’s still not getting any better, in the morning I’m taking her back to the doctor. Stan, my husband found Mindy in vomit early Saturday, not able to speak or move most of her body. We had her life flighted to U of L hospital. We thought at first maybe tick fever or something. We asked them to check for the West Nile Virus. At that time. May of 2002, the doctors had had no human cases of West Nile so they didn’t know how or what to look for so they dismissed us like we were nuts to suggest it could be West Nile. They induced Mindy into a coma and she was on a ventilator and the doctors told us she probably would not make it. I refused to believe I would not bring my baby home from that hospital… One night they came to give her dialysis and her blood pressure shot up and caused her to have a brain death. I talked and sang to her all night, (she never liked my singing,) the doctor turned off the ventilator the next morning per my request. When I saw Mindy’s lifeless face after the brain death, I cried, “Where is our soul, is it in our brain or in our heart?” No one could answer me… As the doctor turned off the vent, and Mindy’s heart beat it’s last beat, I saw her soul rise up out of her chest like a mist and go up into the air. I knew then that God had answered my question. I will forever live with the guilt of not taking Mindy to the doctor sooner. All the ‘why didn’t I’s and if only I had…’ will torment me until I die.