The expression "love at first sight" applied to both hospital pharmacist Deborah Johnston and investment analyst Douglas Cunningham when they met at a wedding reception in Hensall, Ont., in 1978. Within three months, they were engaged. A month later, they had purchased their first home in Toronto, and in 1979 they were married.
Debbie had followed her father into pharmacy, graduating from the University of Toronto in 1971. In the ensuing decade, she assisted in the clinical reviews of renal transplant anti-rejection drugs at Toronto Western Hospital. Sadly, it was a renal problem that eventually took her life.
Debbie retired from the hospital when her son Michael was born in 1981. She returned to pharmacy briefly after her daughter Sarah was born in 1983 to assist in the implementation of the morphine pump program for palliative care patients in Oakville. In her dying days, Debbie noted that the improvements in infusion technologies enabled her to live her final days at home without pain.
As a person who spent a great deal of her life in the hospital, but not as a patient, Debbie was determined to spend as little time there as possible following three serious events in the year before her death. Five days after a platelet crash caused by an adverse drug reaction, she went home and resumed her morning six-kilometre walk. She was discharged four days after her left kidney was removed in September and back walking within a week. Unfortunately, the week before Christmas her walks were interrupted by sharp pains stemming from an aggressive squamous cell tumour that had filled the space where her kidney once was. Radiation and chemotherapy failed to halt the tumour, and she vowed to spend her final days at the family's Oakville, Ont., residence, nicknamed Chateau Cairncroft, noting, "Hospitals are for sick people."
Debbie was conscious of the need to effectively manage health-care dollars and was aware that institutionalized end-of-life care cost more than home care. However, her family believes her desire to be at home was motivated by the need to direct Doug's spring planting from her hospital bed overlooking her gardens. An early spring enabled Debbie to enjoy her daffodils and tulips and, in the week before her death, the aptly named forget-me-nots. She has not been forgotten by her fellow May Court Club puppeteers or by her circle of friends from other volunteer organizations in Oakville.
During her lifetime Debbie managed to visit 68 countries, many of the trips in support of the family's telecommunications businesses. At the June 1 celebration of her life, Debbie's walking shoes, which had been to 26 countries, were finally retired.
Sarah Nelson is Debbie's daughter.