Bob Wilson:
CLASS OF 1968
Victoria High SchoolClass of 1968
Victoria, BC
Bob's Story
What Happened?
Between 1968 and 2008 I was busy. I went to UVic for 3 years then left for 2 years then came back and finished a B.Ed. degree and in the meantime got married and had two kids - one of each species. Started teaching career in Quesnel just south of Prince George and taught English & Social Studies to grades 8, 9 & 10 for a few years then transferred to an elementary school and taught students in a grade 5 class for near on 10 years. Every year I told them how lucky they were to be going on to grade 6 while I was remaining in grade 5 for another year. It was lots of fun but eventually teachers slipped into multi-grade classes. When I left classroom teaching in 1988 I had a 3-way split of grades 2, 3 & 4. I had returned to UVic in the summers of 1983 and 1984 to earn my M.Ed. in 1985. From 1986 to 1990 I attended UVic every summer to take every course offered in Learning Assistance and Special Needs education. In 1989 I took a position as Learning Assistance teacher at an elementary school then transferred to Chilliwack as Learning Assistant at a junior high school which became a middle school. I transferred from there in 2001 to become the low incidence program coordinator at Fraser Valley Distance Education School in Chilliwack, a position I left when I retired at the end of December 2008. The 34 years in teaching just zoomed by for the most part but some things passed too slowly.
My wife passed away in January 2003. We had been married for 28 years. Our children, son and daughter are grown - 39 & 32 respectively and married and have children of their own (4 grand kids). I recently remarried, retired as mentioned, and have moved back to Victoria. My new wife and I are happily involved in church and community activities, reading, writing, traveling and the arts. Now, between the two of us we have 2 sons and 2 daughters and a total of 6 grandchildren. And it's great to be back here in Victoria; sometimes it feels like I had never left.
My first wife, Barbara Crocker, had complications in giving birth to our daughter in October 1976. Soon after the delivery she started to bleed and nothing could be done to stop the bleeding. This was our first child and we had been married twenty months. She didn¿t want to upset me by letting on that anything was wrong so she told me the baby was fine but the bilirubin was high so they wanted them to stay in the hospital for a few days longer. In the early hours of a morning about five days after the birth I was phoned at home by one of the doctors working on her and he told me to get down to the hospital immediately as she was dying. They had tried everything to save her life and eventually a hysterectomy was performed and this stopped the hemorrhaging. Five liters of blood were given before the operation was concluded successfully and unknown at that time the blood was tainted with the Hepatitis C virus.
Barbara was in generally good health until the early 1990¿s and then deterioration to her immune system began. She eventually went to a doctor and was diagnosed with Hepatitis C in May 1996. She was generally in pain and assorted ailments plagued her through the rest of the decade and into the fall of 2002. At the end of October she suffered her first upper gastro-intestinal bleed. Her liver was overcome and could not function properly and she would have died on October 31 2002 if it had not been for Dr. Bernie Schopft in the ER at Chilliwack General. He just happened to be visiting other patients on that day and he operated using an instrument that went down the throat into the esophagus and shot rubber bands around the areas that were bleeding. Barbara was hospitalized and stabilized but not before she had another near fatal GI bleed on November 5. After she once again recovered and stabilized she was sent home on several medications. From October 31 through November my daughter and I lived in a state of shock. But we didn¿t know what was to come; everyone was just praying for recovery and the possibility of a liver transplant was pursued however after consulting with the head of transplant medicine at Vancouver General on December 7 2002 our hopes were severally deflated when he said, ¿Nobody gets put on the transplant list unless I say so and right now there are people ahead of you who have been waiting over two years.¿ This was said in response to us stating that Dr. Schopft felt Barbara would be a good candidate for a liver transplant.
For the next few weeks she slept most of the time regardless of whether it was day or night and was really very embarrassed to be do...Expand for more
ing so since she now worked with children in the school district and wanted to get back to them. She still appeared in good health and insisted on doing all preparations for Christmas including dinner and tree decorating. A grandson was born in Abbotsford from our son and his wife on December 31 2002 and we drove out to the hospital to see proud Shawn and Shannon and these were the last pictures in which Barbara appeared. She was deathly afraid of starting to bleed again and not being able to stop. She was so upset at not being able to tend to our six month old granddaughter for fear that her finger nails might scratch her and she would bleed to death. She was scheduled to see her specialist on January 7 2003 but started to bleed again on January 5. She was rushed to Chilliwack General where she spent four days in a basement alcove just away from the ER due to a lack of available staffed space in the hospital. On January 10 she was moved to a room but quickly became overcome by toxins from a liver that was failing to function. The afternoon of January 10 I rode with her as she was rushed by ambulance to Vancouver General where she slipped into a coma. My daughter and I visited her everyday; she never regained consciousness. Nearly every one of her organs shut down except her heart and each day we would meet with some of the team of twenty-two doctors that were working on her case and everyday the news was worse. A liver transplant was carried out on January 13 ¿ 14 but it was too late and there never was bodily use made of the transplanted liver. Barbara was taken off life support six hours after friends and family were called to come and say good-bye; she was administered morphine to ease the pain and she died twenty minutes after removal of life support on January 25 2003.
We had been married for more than twenty-seven years and had two children and three grandchildren (the third was born just one week before Barb went into the coma). There are probably some people that may never be over her passing. It took me two and one half years to decide to go on. I was very upset and angry that Barbara had died but most of that, I think, had to do with the fact that I missed her being there so much. I was alone in the house except for my little Yorkshire Poodle cross, Rockwell, who slept with me but I still set up an electric heating pad on the side of the bed where Barbara had slept. For months afterward I would be overcome with emotion and couldn¿t seem to get over the fact that someone who had shared so much of my life was gone and with her were gone all the years of memories of that life that could never be recaptured as they would have to be lived and experienced all over again and the time was gone and lost forever. I was very unhappy and not really caring about myself, in fact, I used to tell people I was having a contest with the dog to see which one of us was to go next. I was totally disinterested in work and only went in about two or three days a week for about six months; there was no point to working any longer as I had only been working to get to retirement for the two of us and that was no longer going to happen. Eventually after about thirty months I managed to pull out of my self-destructive nosedive and simply woke up one morning thinking it was time to get on with my life. I had become more involved in affairs of the family and I had come to terms with the fact that Barbara was gone and wasn¿t coming back ¿ ever no matter how many times I thought I might see or dream of her. But then again, I think I may have been wrong again but this time with a good outcome.
We who knew her will all miss her but we can take solace in the fact that she will live on in our memories and in the words and deeds she shared and in the faces and the spirit of her children. She, too, like my mother, deeply loved her grandchildren and it is sad to think that she was coming to a point in her life when all she would have to do is sit back in retirement and enjoy those grandchildren. She only lived to her fifty-first year but she lived out her days knowing she was certain to die with more dignity than I or many others might summon. And only a few times did she state quietly, ¿Life is not fair¿ and ¿I just want to go to sleep and wake up being all OK again¿. And that is why there must be a God ¿ in order for that to happen. I know in my life if it weren¿t for angels like Barbara taking a hand in day-to-day happenings many outcomes would have been quite different.
Cheers to you all! Drop us a note sometime.
Bob & Leslie
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