Honor and remembrance
By Jill Kimbrough
We all have those main experiences in our lives that change the very person we are. One of these life-changing moments happened to me five years ago when my mother was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer. I was in 8th grade; my twin brothers were in 5th.
When I first found out that my mom had cancer, I really didn’t understand it that well. My dad tried to explain it to me and my younger brothers to the best of his ability. He told us that she was in the fourth stage and that out of twenty lymph nodes, all except one were positive for cancer. He explained to us the chemotherapy process by telling us that she was going to be very sick and tired most of the time. When we asked how long it was going to take and how bad it was going to be, he just reassured us by saying, “Your mom is really tough. Don’t worry she is going to be OK.”
Over the next couple of months my mom was always sick and lying around the house in her pajamas. She would rarely get out of the house, and if she did, it was a really big deal. However, no matter how sick she got and no matter how much pain she was in, she would always find the bright side.
One time when my dad came home from work and was walking up the stairs, my mom took one look at him and turned towards her sick bowl. She later joked around by saying that my dad, “made her sick to her stomach.” As you can imagine, this was a joke that my whole family got a kick out of.
Once her hair started falling out, she tried as hard as she could to make it stop. She even went to the extremes by getting a product called, “LoShed,” which is actually supposed to stop dogs from shedding. I cannot tell you how many bottles she went through before she finally accepted it. But before long she was joking around about her baldness as well. She was known for being able to take the fastest shower out of all of her friends. She was distressed because she still had to shave her legs and armpits. She figured that if she had to lose the hair on top of her head that she should have lost it everywhere else too.
After going through two courses of chemo and a course of radiation, we finally started to see improvements. Then she got the West Nile virus. The virus viciously took over her brain and nervous systems. We first noticed that something was wrong when my brothers and I were home alone with her. She wanted to go to bed so we lifted her off the couch and took her to her room. She was so weak that she couldn’t stand up by herself, so my brothers and I each took a side of her and slowly walked her down the hall.
She got one knee up onto the bed then fell backwards hitting the floor with a loud thump. We all gasped and then she started laughing uncontrollably and then all of a sudden passed out. My brothers and I looked at each other confused out of our minds. We knew that this kind of behavior was definitely not normal. We tried to figure out whether to call an ambulance or my dad. We ended up calling my dad. He took her to the emergency room later that evening. She was West Nile case 96 in the state of Nebraska in 2003.
The West Nile virus created a lot of swelling and pressure in her brain. This ended up making her forget about a week of her life and paralyzed her on the left side. For the next couple of months, she worked hard moving from a wheel chair to a walker to a cane, and then back to walking on her own again.
She was bedridden for such a long period that she ended up getting Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT). This was a giant blood clot that started in her left hip and went all the way down to near her ankle. She had to have an umbrella-shaped structure put in her directly below her breast bone to stop any parts of the blood clot that had broken off from getting to her lungs or heart.
Throughout this whole process my mom was also battling brain tumors. She had about 20 to 30 dime-sized tumors at once. She had several radiation treatments. You would often hear her joking around about being able to light up a dark room like a light bulb because of all the radiation treatments. She used to joke around with the nurses too. They took funny pictures of her holding the drills that were used to take the metal crown out of her head after each treatment.
After a couple of months of radiation we got some very good news. She was clear of tumors from the neck down and all of the brain tumors were shrinking. For the next two weeks she was herself again. She was driving, running errands, hanging out with her friends again and starting to tell me to clean up my room. Then it came time for her next check-up. Another type of brain cancer had started on her brain stem. The doctors described it as a pudding-like substance that was slowly covering her brain. They gave her two weeks, she made it ten days. She lived long enough to have one last wedding anniversary, their 15th, and then passed away at 5:21 p.m. the next day. She passed away listening to Josh Groban and with her closest friends and my dad at her side.
August 28 was five years since she has passed away. She touched many lives throughout her life. If she touched yours, I invite you to come out to her grave site in honor and in remembrance of her memory.
UPDATE MARCH 1, 2009:
Jill’s mother, who died of breast cancer in 2003, touched many lives, people Jill hopes will visit her graveside to remember her.
“I just wanted people to remember my mom and not forget about her. She touched a lot of people in Grand Island. I wanted people to go out and visit her and anyone else they may have forgotten about just to keep them in their memory.”
Jill, a freshman music education major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, still frequently visits her mother’s grave.
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