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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Riverside Christian mom relishes this trip to state


Diane Pynch sits courtside and cheers for Riverside Christian as it wins its opening-day game against Bear Creek.
 (Christopher Anderson / The Spokesman-Review)
John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review

Basketball, we’ve been told, is not brain surgery.

The fan part of basketball, well, that can be another thing altogether.

This is not to make light of what it took for Diane Pynch to be in attendance Wednesday at the State 2B basketball tournament, which would seem to stretch the bounds of credulity – and prudence – at least a little. Yet there she was at the end of the scorer’s table at the Spokane Arena, wearing a bright blue ‘do-rag and an expression of equal parts pride, wonder and happiness.

“It’s all pretty amazing to me,” she allowed.

And to her sons, Chris and Jeremy – members of the Riverside Christian team that bruised Bear Creek 66-44 in its first-round game.

“Seeing her there,” said Chris, “makes everything easy.”

A lot of emotion and words have been expended detailing just what the 2B isn’t – and regrettably it isn’t the same event Spokane took to its heart for 50 years. But it is a state tournament, with the same discoveries of the innocent, the improbable and the downright miraculous.

Diane Pynch, 47, had been feeling lousy all winter. She had the flu constantly, awful headaches, vomiting, the works.

“I felt like I was going to fall down all the time,” she said.

At a Riverside Christian game on Jan. 22, her unsteady, listing gait was noticed by another Crusader parent – Dan Doornink, the former Washington State running back and now a Yakima physician. He all but ordered her to the hospital the next day for a cat scan, which revealed a baseball-sized tumor on the frontal lobe.

Scary news. Scarier still three days later at Valley Memorial Hospital when the swelling caused by the tumor pushed the brain into the stem. Her cousin, Cindy Byrne, is a nurse and was in the room at the time.

“That’s when she stopped breathing,” Byrne said.

The emergency surgery, performed by Dr. Gus Varnavas, lasted five hours, until 2 a.m. Predictably, the first few days were filled with anxiety and uncertainty. She would spend two weeks on a ventilator in a medically induced coma “to keep her calm,” said Byrne, “because there was so much swelling in the brain they needed her to be still and she was such as fighter that she kept waking up.”

And for her sons – Chris, Jeremy and an older brother, Trevor – and husband Tony, “Everything just kind of stopped,” Chris said.

For the Crusaders’ community, too. Diane wasn’t just Chris and Jeremy’s mom, she was “our basketball mom, too,” said RC coach Bruce Siebol. Among other things, she’s the comptroller for Crusaders’ summer basketball ventures and keeps the scorebook at games. So the family’s hospital vigil was supplemented by a steady stream of players and friends, something that wasn’t lost on Chris.

Diane Pynch noted that her youngest son, Jeremy – a sophomore – comes across as a stoic, with everything under control. Chris, a senior, “is the tender-hearted one,” more likely to wear his emotions on his sleeve, as he does when he recalled his world unraveling.

Five days after the surgery, the Crusaders had a road game at Lyle. The boys had not been to school or practice the entire week.

“I didn’t want to be there – I don’t know if coach would like me saying that or not,” Chris said. “I didn’t want to go. I figured I had to. It was a couple of hours away and I didn’t want to be that far away from her, even though we knew by then she was going to make it.”

At that game and one the next night at home, Bryne kept in contact with the hospital by cell phone. She remembered Chris panicking when he spied her on the phone until she reassured him that “it was something good.”

As time went on, the news got better. The tumor turned out to be non-cancerous. After two weeks the swelling had subsided that Varnavas was able to reattach her skull – which had been kept on ice. She was moved out of intensive care and began physical therapy. And last Thursday, she was released from the hospital – in time for RC’s district playoff game Friday night.

“I wanted to get ready for state,” she said. “This is Chris’ senior year and he only had five games left.”

The story she knows only through the retelling by others. There is a three-week gap in her life’s tape. And with tournament season under way “nothing has been normal yet.” She looks forward to sharing with her family the enduring lessons of these sorts of ordeals – the ones that revolve around love and faith, and devotion to each other.

For Chris, the lessons have already been imprinted.

“I’m so thankful to just see her there,” he said Wednesday. “Before this game, I was very nervous. But she was sitting there in her wheelchair, and she held my hand and told me she loved me. The first few games after her surgery that she wasn’t there, I was very upset and on the edge because I didn’t have my mom there – and my dad couldn’t be there, either.

“It’s just very nice have her there with me.”