Patricia Keane DeGeorge, 30, Registered Nurse

Wednesday, August 18, 1999, from Newsday

Patricia DeGeorge visited the dying each day, caring for terminally in patients in their homes.

She could have cried pointless rivers every day, but her job required her to preside over her emotions. She bathed withering bodies or satisfied midnight cravings for milk. She gave them the most she could, which sometimes was her home telephone number. ''You weren't supposed to give patients your home number," said Deirdre Kroupa, a close friend and also a nurse. "But Patty did. They would call, and she would go."

DeGeorge worked six years as a nurse's aide for a hospice service, dispensing patients' medicines and always attending their funerals, even as she ran the unrelenting medical regimen of her own cancer.

In 1994, two years after starting her job, she was told she had leukemia. Chemotherapy kept it in remission for almost four years. But as life seemed to right itself -- she earned a nursing degree, passed her certifying exam, bought a house in Ronkonkoma with, her husband, Paul DeGeorge -- the disease returned. She died yesterday at age 30, 10 months after her youngest brother Michael gave her one last hope by donating his bone marrow for a transplant, a perfect match, he was the envy of his siblings.

"We all wished we could be the one," said brother K.C. Keane, who lived with his only sister and her husband. "She was definitely our No. 1. The three brothers, we're all very different, and we may not all be as close to each other, but we're all close to Patty."

She is also survived by her older brother Rob and her parents, Kathy and Robert Keane, the chief of staff for Newsday Publisher Raymond A. Jansen.

DeGeorge's funeral will be 11 a.m. Friday at St. Killian's Roman Catholic Church at 485 Conklin St. in Farmingdale. She will be buried at St. Charles Cemetery in East Farmingdale. Viewing will be tomorrow at the James Funeral Home at 540 Broadway in Massapequa from 2 to 4:40 p.m. and from 7 to 9:30 p.m.

DeGeorge had resolved to celebrate her 30th birthday, which arrived Aug 9 with her in a hospital bed in Houston. Her father called a cab to fetch her birthday wish -- a Snow Biz, a vanilla-flavored shaved-ice dessert she discovered two years ago while on vacation in South Carolina with Paul. Everyone-in the room remembered with amusement the day she'd discovered the treat. To keep it from melting that hot day in Myrtle Beach, she had held it in front of the car's air conditioning, while singing, "... there's no business like snow business ..."

On her last birthday, her friends played her favorite disco tapes, recordings of "Car Wash, "Disco Inferno" and "I Will Survive."

"She went from being pretty quiet, to shaking and bobbing her head," Kroupa said. "It seemed to soothe her."

July 27 was to be her first day working as a fully certified registered nurse in the intensive-care unit at Winthrop University Hospital in Mineola. She passed her board exams on her first try, in August, 1998, three months after graduating with honors from Adelphi University's nursing program, and one month after discovering her cancer had returned. The feat astonished her faculty adviser.

"I didn't even know she took the boards," said Jean Winter. "It's a phenomenally difficult exam, which takes a lot of preparation, and it's very stressful. Students who are healthy, whose lives are going beautifully, are stressed by it. That she did it was a very hopeful sign for her. I think she felt empowered."

In fact, DeGeorge already was used to studying while staving off the ache and dread of the disease. She had completed less than one year of nursing school when she was diagnosed. She took one-year off during the most intensive period of chemotherapy but otherwise attended school while she was either receiving treatment or recovering from it.

She had come to rely on her will, the same will she saw build in her former patients before swaying under a greater weight. From them, she learned that when the end is certain, will transforms itself into grace.

"We talked about it a month ago," Kroupa said. "She said that it can be such a peaceful way to go. She cherished her role, to be there for the family as much for the patient, and help them walk through to the other side. She said it taught her a lot about life and death."

On her final day, she squirted KC with a bottle of nasal spray, smiling to let him know it was not an accident. "That was Patty," her brother said. "Right up until the end, she was herself."

She was her best, her friends said, around Paul. They met nine years ago at an East Meadow dance club. He got up his courage in the parking lot and asked her out as she was about to drive away. For once, she gave out her real phone number.

Married for six years, each was the perfect complement to the other, friends said. They would call each other on cellular phones constantly just to talk no matter how brief the separation.

"Hi, Weets [their mutual nickname for each other]," the call would usually begin. "Just calling to say hi.Where are you?"

"I'm in the driveway, Weets," was often the answer. Friends described DeGeorge in somewhat clashing terms, predominantly shy but a mesmerizing teller of stories, not particularly effusive (except with Paul) but especially conscientious when it came to gifts or cards.

At her sickest, she sent cards to her friends to cheer them up. In June, after her final relapse, she engineered a surprise birthday party for her childhood friend Lisa Brown even though she was too sick to stay.

The past three weeks, impaired by medication, she spoke only a few times of the obvious and inevitable. Once, in an eerily poised conversation with Kroupa, she talked about heaven.

"She said she believed 'heaven has no time,' that when we pass we will all be together," Kroupa said, "and that what is years on earth will feel only like a split second in heaven. To me, that was a good way of putting it."