Clarkson couple hope to overcome misfortune

Wayne Smith is running out of time and money.

Last Thursday, a stranger stole a purse belonging to Smith’s wife. In it was the couple’s car keys, titles to their vehicles, 37 different medical perscriptions and $4,084 – all the money they had to get Wayne Smith through the last two or three months of his terminal liver cancer.

While Spokane police investigate the reported robbery, the Clarkston couple are trying to figure out where to sleep tonight.

“How can anyone take someone else’s medicine and leave him to die?” Bonnie Smith asked, shaking her head. “They figure he’s going to go a bit quicker now because he doesn’t have the right medication and he’s not eating right.”

Police are not releasing any information on the case. The investigation is continuing, said Dick Cottam, police spokesman.

Bonnie Smith had helped the alleged thief the day before. The woman had claimed her car broke down and asked to use the Smiths’ phone to call her boyfriend. When she couldn’t reach anybody, the Smiths gave her a ride back to her neighborhood, Smith said.

When Smith saw the woman at the hotel the next morning, she didn’t think much of it – until she saw her running across the parking lot with her bulky bag. Smith drove to the woman’s neighborhood and tracked down the thief, who had the stolen purse around her neck when she opened the door. Smith then pulled her out of the doorway, and she fell down three flights of stairs to the bottom. The woman’s boyfriend ran out the door with bags of a white powder and a small silver gun, Smith said.

Smith chased the woman, and the two got into a struggle in the middle of the street. The woman kicked Smith backwards and took off running. Before she escaped, Smith gave the thief a bloody nose by hitting her face into the street. Smith again pursued her, but she couldn’t run far, her knees plastic as a result of a collision with a drunken driver 30 years ago.

Now Wayne Smith is dying slowly without his medicine.

Doctors initially told him he had the flu when he didn’t feel well in late May. A week later, he couldn’t walk. That’s when doctors at another hospital diagnosed him with liver cancer.

He traveled to Spokane for surgery June 4. Doctors went into his liver with a camera and discovered a football-sized tumor.

It hasn’t been an easy few months for the Smiths. They’re the parents of three grown daughters, and they watched in May as a head-on collision killed their youngest daughter’s husband and left their 2-year-old granddaughter with 93 percent brain damage. Bonnie Smith’s brother in Utah died of a heart attack two weeks ago, and her father in Spokane died Saturday. The Smiths also found out two weeks ago that Wayne Smith’s father in Spokane has the same terminal liver cancer. Doctors gave him four months to live.

It’s just added stress on two people who don’t know where to sleep come tonight.

“My rent is paid until 1 o’clock, and then we have no idea what we’re going to do,” Bonnie Smith said. “We got to find a place to live.”

The two $1 bills and spare change sitting in an empty pickle jar on the table is all the money they have left. They’re thinking about moving into the back of their beige Chevy truck parked in the hotel lot.

The self-employed couple doesn’t have medical insurance – “I’ve never gotten sick,” Wayne Smith said. He applied for Social Security and disability benefits last month and Medicaid last Friday, but he won’t see any funds until this fall at the earliest.

They’ve spent about $4,000 on prescriptions alone. The bill for two days in the hospital came to $22,000, but Wayne Smith has been in and out of the hospital since his diagnosis and the other bills have yet to arrive.

The Smiths got a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread and a can of fruit cocktail at a food bank, but Wayne Smith could only eat the fruit. They’re surviving on what’s left and donations from the inn’s maids, including a box of macaroni and cheese and graham crackers.

By mid-afternoon, Wayne Smith has only had two bites of a hamburger – nausea having stolen his appetite. He’s lost nearly 40 pounds in less than two months, his baggy blue jeans two sizes too big.

His eyes are shut, his wrinkled face an emotionless expanse. He’s too exhausted to feel anything but the wrenching pain in his gut.

He spends 20 hours a day lying in the hotel bed with a flower-print comforter. He doesn’t sleep well, and he sleeps even worse now that his sleeping pills are gone. The heat outside makes him nauseous, confining him to the air-conditioned room and his $2,500 oxygen tank.

It’s hard for the carpenter who’s used to working seven days a week.

“I love being outside doing stuff, but I can’t,” he said. “I worry so much about my kids and grandkids,” he said. “I want to watch them grow up, go to school. I don’t get to see any of that now.”

It’s no easier for his wife, who hasn’t cried in front of her husband since his diagnosis. But it’s different when she’s alone, thinking about her husband of 27 years dying, thinking about what tomorrow might mean.

“I’m going to be lost,” she simply said, hands on her forehead. “I can’t do nothing. I just … I don’t know … I can’t do nothing. This is one that’s out of my control.”

Anyone with information on the robbery is asked to call Crime Check at 456-2233.