Cheryl Neely often brought her work home with her. If one of the babies in her care died or suffered a trying day, she shared it with friends and family.
""She just had a love for little people," said Shana Renee Hart, a daughter from Atlanta. "She would get attached, and sometimes she would come home in tears. She definitely carried her job home with her."
"There were not many conversations we had in which she didn't talk about her job, especially if one didn't make it," noted Carol Bialkowski, a sister from Wheelersburg, Ohio. "About three weeks ago, they lost a baby, and she cried a long time over that one."
Mrs. Neely was a career nurse who, due to a former marriage to a military man, logged time in hospitals around the globe. For the past 20 years or so, though, Piedmont Newnan Hospital in Coweta County had been her place of employment, where she worked in the neonatal intensive care unit.
Cheryl Lyn Neely of Peachtree City had a heart arrhythmia, an abnormal or irregular heart beat. She was taking a shower on a recent Saturday when her heart apparently stopped beating and caused her to fall and strike her head. She suffered a brain hemorrhage and doctors told family she went without oxygen anywhere from 11 to 40 minutes, resulting in permanent damage. She was taken off life support and died Friday at Piedmont Fayette Community Hospital. She was 50. A funeral was held Sunday in the chapel of Carmichael-Hemperley Funeral Home & Crematory in Peachtree City, which handled arrangements.
Mrs. Neely was born in Bedford, Ohio, and graduated from high school in nearby Twinsburg. She studied accounting at Ohio State University, then joined the U.S. Army and served four years. She then married a military man and earned a nursing degree from Niagara County Community College near Buffalo, N.Y.
Wherever the military sent the couple, Mrs. Neely practiced care. She was a nurse for hospitals in Germany, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, among others. She and her family moved to metro Atlanta in 2001. After a divorce, she eventually met and dated Buddy Sward of Peachtree City. He found her unconscious on the shower floor.
"She was proud of her military service," he said, "and she was proud of her nursing career. We had a lot of fun together and I converted her from an Ohio State girl to a Georgia Bulldog. She loved Uga," [the Bulldog mascot].
Mrs. Neely enjoyed boating along the Georgia coast and collecting sea shells. She had expressed to family that she never wanted to live in a vegetative state.
Taking her off life support, her daughter said, "was the hardest, most agonizing decision ever. The day she passed was also the day I found out she was going to be a grandma. I believe she already knows, though."
Survivors besides a daughter, sister and partner include parents, Nick and Marilyn Bialkowski of North Fort Myers, Fla.; and a brother, Nick Bialkowski Jr. of North Bergen, N.J.
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