MORGANTOWN - The hospice nurse who works around the clock to manage such things insisted on morphine so Donna Tucker wouldn't feel much pain Wednesday, the day Tucker spent fulfilling her dying dream.
Tucker was subdued, mostly numb to the tumor that's protruding through the chest wall on her left side.
"This is not Memaw," said Heather Gunter, one of Tucker's five grandchildren. "If this was Memaw, she would be screaming, 'Let's go, Mountaineers' right now."
Memaw still had her moments, whether hugging football players, waving a blue foam finger or fitting in a few final cheers, on a day designed to give her so many.
She was an invited guest of West Virginia's football program, 13 days after a doctor diagnosed her with pneumonia and pleurisy and 10 days after a CT scan revealed something worse.
Tucker's family knew in January she had a spot on her right lung. They learned last week there were two tumors on her left lung.
"What they basically told us was it had spread to her lymph nodes," said Krista Womack, another grandchild, "and she had six to eight weeks to live."
As is custom in times like this, the memories came quickly. Tucker, 79, has been going to WVU games for as long as anyone can remember. She never had season tickets, but that didn't stop her from making frequent trips to Mountaineer Field or even bowl games.
She converted a spare bedroom in her home on Charleston's west side into a WVU room. She loves Don Nehlen, Pat White and Owen Schmitt, and she can still reel off particular plays and performances by her favorite player, Major Harris.
When the grandchildren were younger and spent time at Memaw's house, they could run and play and yell all they wanted, but that had to stop once WVU came on the radio or the television.
"When the Mountaineers were on," Womack said, "you'd better be quiet."
Time passed and everyone grew up and moved on, but the family remained connected through football, even if they watched from different places. Tucker made WVU's fight song the ring tone on her cell phone. When the Mountaineers scored, she'd call Womack, who'd have to hang up and call back so Tucker's phone would ring and play her song.
Granted, it's not always easy watching WVU, and the family frequently went through those times together, too.
"She was always calling us on the phone, cussing and carrying on," Gunter said.
Nobody who knows Tucker was surprised when she spoke up and said she wanted to see the Mountaineers play one last time.
"Time is not going to allow that, most likely, so we thought, 'Well, the next best thing is maybe we can bring her up to the stadium to sit in the stands and see the field again,' " Womack said.
Gunter went online with the request early last week, and social media pushed it up into the hierarchy of WVU's program. Within just a few hours, the Mountaineers invited Tucker and her family to town. Six cars decorated with gold and blue messages cheering on Memaw made the trip up Interstate 79. One of the six had a cooler of Natural Light, Tucker's favorite tailgate feature.
The Mountaineers had a surprise for Tucker, though. Her wheelchair was whisked into the team's meeting room, and players wearing the jerseys Tucker knows from television gave her a bag of goodies. A scarf. Flying WV cookies. The foam finger.
"It puts life into perspective," center Tyler Orlosky said. "You see how life can change. To be able to make her day and to make a dream come true, that's something special. Not that many people can do that. It touches you deep down inside."
In the theater seating the Mountaineers use to watch film, Tucker sat in the middle of the front row and watched a highlight video from the 2015 season.
And then it was perfectly clear that how she feels about the Mountaineers is more powerful than the stuff that's supposed to keep her from feeling much of anything.
"I hope that's a tape the coach makes them watch over and over again," she said.
These days, Tucker lives with a nurse, and her family takes turns staying at her house to pitch in or to simply be there with her. She needs help to move from point to point in her wheelchair, and on Wednesday, the duty first went to right guard Kyle Bosch.
He carefully steered the wheelchair out of the meeting room and then out of the Puskar Center, along a sidewalk and finally down the tunnel that leads to the new artificial turf in the southwest corner of Mountaineer Field.
Bosch was flanked by some of his teammates. There was Orlosky and offensive linemen Tony Matteo and Marcell Lazard, defensive linemen Noble Nwachukwu, Christian Brown and Darrien Howard and kicker Mike Molina.
So Donna Tucker took the field with players from her favorite team.
"It's really an honor to know this was the last thing she wanted to do and that we mean that much to her," Nwachukwu said. "It's really humbling."
Tucker posed for pictures with the players and the trophy the Mountaineers won at the Cactus Bowl. In the background, the scoreboard shared a message:
WEST VIRGINIA FOOTBALL WELCOMES DONNA TUCKER A LIFE-LONG MOUNTAINEER FAN
"She has macular degeneration," Womack said. "If she could see this, she'd be in tears."
Of course, Tucker's family also agreed she'd be mad people were making a fuss over her, but there was no time for that. A moment later, it was Brown's turn to grab the handles and wheel Tucker to the middle of the field and the gigantic Flying WV.
She posed for more pictures with the players and her family, including both of her children, all five grandchildren and all five great grandchildren. They fired their hands into the air and shouted, "Let's go, Mountaineers."
The huddle broke. The family members hugged the players and one another. Some of them smiled. Some wiped away tears. Some couldn't help but do both.
"I never expected this in a million years," Womack said. "All we wanted to do was bring her here and sit her in the stands and look at the field. They've gone above and beyond everything. It's the most unbelievable thing I've ever seen."
Contact Mike Casazza at 304-319-1142 or mikec@wvgazettemail.com. Follow him on Twitter @mikecasazza and read his blog at http://blogs.wvgazettemail.com/wvu/.