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She remembers in exacting, excruciating detail everything about that room at St. Rita's Hospital in Lima, how the medical machines sounded and how her deathly ill daughter looked lying there in that bed.

The overwhelming burden and heartbreak she and her husband, Rick, were feeling that day — she remembers that, too. Most of all, Jayne Byrne will never forget those words she heard herself whispering:

"Her dad and I were both in tears, and I said, 'Krystal, you don't have to keep fighting for Mom and Dad. It's OK. You can let go. You fought so hard.' "

Their daughter — the tall, muscular girl with the wild strawberry-blond hair, the trailblazing athlete and top student at Ottoville High School, the effervescent freshman visual communications design student at the University of Dayton — hadn't just fought, she'd taken on all comers in a deadly medical free-for-all.

She had battled leukemia and the debilitating chemotherapy, radiation and the pneumonia that came with it. When doctors couldn't find her a match among 6 million bone marrow donors, she had gotten a cord blood/stem cell transplant, then dealt with the disease that came when the donated immune cells attacked her body.

All those friends she'd made on the sixth floor of the Lerner Tower at Cleveland's University Hospital — the 20-something guys Brian and Nate; Kim, the 30-year-old mother of a two-year-old; Becky, who was in her 40s, and Jim in his 60s, all of them fellow cancer patients — they all had died.

She, too, had been given last rites a couple of times. She'd lost 60 pounds and been hospitalized much of the 18 months since she was first diagnosed. And then, when she had recovered enough to return to UD in August 2006 after relearning to walk, she was felled again.

Two weeks after her return, she had been unable to breathe. Fluids filled her lungs and gathered around her heart and she was taken by Life-Flight back to Cleveland. Her kidneys had failed.

And so now, back in that Lima hospital room awaiting a transplant with her health failing more and more, her mom finally said what so many thought.

"Everyone thought, 'This poor girl, maybe she just needs an out,' " Jayne said. "So I told her she didn't have to keep fighting."

Krystal heard, but said nothing. She just lay there in that room with her special Dayton Flyers blanket. On the wall — along with the UD posters — were some of the cards from her college classmates and professors and stored in her memory were all those experiences, challenges and possibilities she'd found at UD her freshman year.

"A day or two after I talked to her, one of the heart doctor's nurses came in to update her living will," said Jayne, tears now beginning to spill. "If her heart quit, they wanted to know how far she wanted them to go with it.

"And Krystal looked at her — looked at all of us like we were stupid — and said, 'I want you to do everything you can to keep me alive.' Well, right then for us, it was 'OK, we're back in this. If you aren't giving up, what were we thinking about?' "

The other afternoon — some two years and several more medical battles since that watershed moment in Lima — there sat Krystal on a shaded park bench between Kennedy Union and Sherman Hall on the UD campus.

"I remember Mom and Dad telling me I didn't have to keep fighting, but never once did I want to give up," the 23-year-old sophomore said. "I've never been a quitter my entire life, but this time I did have to push a lot harder."

And where did she find that push to get through what her mom now calls "3½ years of hell?"

Along with the strength drawn from family and friends and her own inner self was something else. She smiled and nodded at the scene around her: the UD campus, the new students and those same old possibilities.

"All I ever wanted was to get back to school here. That was my dream. When I was a freshman, people here had made me feel I could accomplish anything, and when all else failed, that's what I hung on to.

"Some people back home told me I ought to stay and go to community college, but I didn't fight through all this to give up on my dream. I'd be so unhappy settling for something second best.

"Dayton was all I wanted."

Playing with the boys

When Krystal first came to UD in the fall of 2004, she found an environment much different than in her northwest Ohio community of 873 people, two blinking traffic lights and a familiarity with everyone else in town.

She'd been the first girl athlete at Ottoville High to win a boy's varsity letter — she won three playing soccer — before she captained the first girls team as a senior.

She was a track athlete, too, and so many other things: She made All Putnam County Band on the saxophone, earned a 3.8 grade point average at school, served communion at the Catholic church, waited tables at the Dew Drop Inn, played electric guitar and piano for fun and once dyed her hair shocking pink.

She took that same zest for life to UD, where she again had a 3.8 GPA, joined the UD Dance Team and hoped to walk onto the Flyers women's soccer team.

When she got sick, everyone rallied around her. Folks in Ottoville held a bone marrow drive and 1,000 people — more than live in the town — each paid the $25 test fee to have a vial of blood drawn.

Her biggest boosters were her parents and her older brother Josh, who worked full-time at a local factory, went to college at the Ohio State University branch in Lima and spent many nights and weekends at Krystal's bedside.

But when times got the roughest, it often was Jayne who stepped to the fore.

"I got a flaming red rash — like a bad case of poison ivy only a hundred times worse — from the top of my head to the tip of my toes." Krystal said.

"I didn't sleep for two weeks. All you can do is lie there and scream and scream and scream some more. They tried hundreds of ointments, oatmeal baths, baking soda baths. None of it worked."

Jayne would hold her daughter and — hoping to take her mind off the pain — listen to Krystal's rap music with her or watch all-night horror films together.

Krystal finally got through that, endured a year of dialysis and then last Sept. 7 — a year ago today — she got a kidney transplant from her mom.

Another six months of medical problems followed, but last March, thanks in part to a change in medication, she turned a corner.

On May 31, Krystal was the maid of honor at Josh's wedding.

"I danced every single dance, I even danced to dinner music," she said, laughing. "I was just so excited about being there. I danced with my friends and sometimes I just danced by myself."

Since doctors say her soccer days are done, she started searching for some sport to participate in.

"I ran a 5K race in Coldwater, Mich., this summer," she said with a grin. "My brother and my therapist and her daughter ran it with me. Actually, they finished way before me. Everybody did. I was the last runner on the course and they had started taking down the arrows and water stations. It took me 46 minutes and I was very, very exhausted, but you know what? I never felt better."

In heaven

Returning to UD hasn't been easy. Almost all the friends she came in with in 2004 have graduated. She still gets winded easily and, with a weakened immune system, is susceptible to infection.

Then there's the daunting prospect of paying for her schooling. She hasn't been able to work for three years and her family is overwhelmed with what she says are "millions" in medical bills.

By the time she's a senior, her Medicaid insurance will run out and her working class parents will have to foot the stratospheric insurance costs along with the UD bills.

"I kind of feel guilty because I could transfer and go somewhere cheaper, but that's the last thing my parents would want," she said. "They know it's my dream to be here.

"And when the stress does build up now and some of those bad memories start coming back, I go to the painting studio, put my iPod on, listen to Dave Matthews and just paint and get myself better."

Jayne believes UD is a good place for her daughter: "She's right where she needs to be right now. She's in heaven."

Heaven includes a house shared with two other women on Alberta Street, a full class load of art and journalism courses, aerobics classes at night to try to build herself back up physically, and a gradual immersion into the sporting scene.

"I joined the Red Scare last week," she said proudly. "And I'm going to a soccer game (this weekend) and I'll try to round up some football groupies for this season. I figure if I can't participate anymore, I'm going to try to cheer everybody else on and lift them."

Her helping hand has extended far more dramatically than just around the UD campus. While the Ottoville bone marrow drive yielded no match for her, three people from there — including her cousin, who's in a Dayton hospital this weekend donating her marrow — have helped save other peoples' lives.

"I figure that's the reason I got sick — there were some other people who needed to be saved," Krystal said. "Because of what I went through, some other families might have it a little easier now."

And maybe they won't have to have that same tearful conversation Jayne had with her daughter that day when hope — not to mention the UD campus — seemed so far away.