Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Hi, everyone, this is Dawn Klem, and you are on my podcast, Milkweed and Monarchs.
[00:00:10] Today I'm going to be sharing a story with you, the story of Kate.
[00:00:17] She was one of my patients, but she was also my friend.
[00:00:24] I first met Kate on the elevator at the hospital, actually, in the outpatient clinic where we both worked.
[00:00:34] It was a Monday morning.
[00:00:36] All Monday mornings were always so hectic in that building.
[00:00:41] Everybody crammed into the elevator. We were packed in there like sardines.
[00:00:49] She was so tall, though. She was way above everybody else. She was looking over all of our heads. And I remember thinking that day, I feel like a sardine. I was backed into the back corner and I was carrying my Starbucks coffee, which was nothing unusual. 90% of the people on the elevator had a Starbucks coffee. And all of us were just hoping that the elevator would stop quickly at each floor and more people would pour out so we could breathe a little easier and not feel so stuffy.
[00:01:30] Finally, everyone had made it out of the elevator except for Kate and myself.
[00:01:39] I had never seen her before that day, but I remember looking over at her and saying, it must be so nice to live above the fray.
[00:01:52] Kate was quite tall, and as you all know by now, I am very short.
[00:01:59] I said, I feel like a minion stuffed in the back corner of a sardine can.
[00:02:06] And she flashed me the biggest smile and she walked off the elevator.
[00:02:13] And I never gave her another thought again.
[00:02:20] Probably six to eight months went by, and I was at my desk at work, and I noticed that one of the surgeons and the neuro oncologists were talking in a very concerned voice to each other.
[00:02:40] Clearly, the oncologist was very upset.
[00:02:45] This was unusual for her. She was usually cool as a cucumber.
[00:02:52] So for her to be upset, I knew that there was something drastically wrong.
[00:02:58] I could tell the surgeon felt the same way.
[00:03:02] This particular surgeon was a compassionate man, very caring.
[00:03:09] So to see the two of them huddled in an unusual conversation had me wondering what was going on.
[00:03:22] Soon, the surgeon parted ways with the oncologist, and she turned to look at me to tell me that someone that she knew had been diagnosed with a brain tumor.
[00:03:39] This didn't seem out of the ordinary to me because we had been working there together, side by side, taking care of brain tumor patients.
[00:03:49] And there had been several people that she knew that had been diagnosed.
[00:03:55] But this one, I could tell, really bothered her.
[00:04:00] She said, we got the preliminary report back from her pathology on her brain tumor surgery, and it seemed like it was going to be okay.
[00:04:16] It didn't seem like it was going to be anything to worry about.
[00:04:21] But today the pathologist called me, and also I got the final report back, and not only is it not okay, but it's the worst type of brain tumor.
[00:04:37] It was called a midline brain tumor.
[00:04:41] And I remember thinking at the time, have we ever had a midline before? And she said, no, they're relatively rare.
[00:04:50] We hardly ever. I don't even remember the last time I've seen one.
[00:04:55] But the worst thing is, we had her in the office, and we told her we thought it was going to be okay. And now we get the final report back, and it's not okay.
[00:05:08] It's horrible.
[00:05:11] And she was actually emotional.
[00:05:17] I remember thinking, oh, this is not going to be an easy one. I can tell right now.
[00:05:25] I mean, we were already dealing with patients that we knew were not going to have a long life expectancy, but we managed to make it through most days.
[00:05:37] This one clearly impacted her.
[00:05:42] At the end of the week, that same week, the woman was scheduled for her appointment to come in and see the oncologist and the neurosurgeon. And at that appointment, she would be seeing me as well.
[00:06:01] I remember I walked into her room, and I was completely shocked.
[00:06:08] There was the woman from the elevator, the woman that stood above the fray.
[00:06:16] How could this be happening? I thought to myself, this cannot be happening. No.
[00:06:26] But I sat down, I introduced myself, and I quickly found out her name was Kate.
[00:06:36] Immediately, I felt a bond with her.
[00:06:41] I don't know why, but there was just something about her that was special.
[00:06:49] She was 37 years old at the time of her diagnosis, and she had a little girl, a toddler.
[00:07:01] I would say she might have been 15 months, 16 months. She wasn't very old.
[00:07:10] And the whole thing was just devastating.
[00:07:14] I did my usual routine with her.
[00:07:18] I went through all the education.
[00:07:20] I told her about the chemotherapy, what she could expect.
[00:07:25] I told her about radiation therapy, what she could expect.
[00:07:29] I told her when she would have her next mri. After treatment, I answered all of her questions.
[00:07:38] And she was so pleasant the whole time.
[00:07:42] It was almost unsettling.
[00:07:45] But I told her, when you start your radiation, I will be there with you once a week to check on you, to make sure that you're doing okay.
[00:07:58] And she liked that idea.
[00:08:02] So after surgery, you don't start your chemo and radiation for one whole month because the brain needs time to heal from the surgery.
[00:08:16] But in a month, she was scheduled, and I walked down to radiation to make sure that everything was okay.
[00:08:27] And there she was big smile on her face, and I could tell she was happy to see me.
[00:08:36] Radiation lasted six weeks, and it was an annual. A weekly trip that I made down there to see her.
[00:08:47] We started to become fast friends.
[00:08:51] Lots of times after her appointment, we would go out to the waiting room and just sit on a bench and talk.
[00:08:59] She would talk to me about my family, I would talk to her about her family.
[00:09:06] It's not something that I would normally do with a patient.
[00:09:11] We're trained in nursing school not to talk about our personal life.
[00:09:17] And part of the reason is because we want the patient to feel like they have our full undivided attention.
[00:09:26] We don't want the patient thinking that we're thinking about our family or. And not them when they're going through treatment.
[00:09:36] But there was something about her.
[00:09:38] I don't know what it was. It's almost was like I had known her all my life.
[00:09:45] She was fascinated with the idea that I had adopted sisters from Romania. And she asked me so many questions about that.
[00:09:56] I wondered at the time if she was thinking about adopting maybe from a foreign country.
[00:10:03] Her father is from China and her mother is from here, from Lowell, Michigan.
[00:10:11] So I think maybe she was thinking about adopting from China.
[00:10:18] So she had so many questions for me about that.
[00:10:22] She was so smart.
[00:10:24] That was the other thing about her. An extremely intelligent woman.
[00:10:30] She had graduated from Michigan State University and had been a fundraiser for nonprofits.
[00:10:39] She had always been a service oriented person.
[00:10:44] And you could just tell by her demeanor and the way she approached people. She really cared about people.
[00:10:54] She had been working at Michigan State University in the College of Human Medicine.
[00:11:03] And that is why doctor.
[00:11:06] The oncologist, I should say, and the neurosurgeon knew her because they dealt with her from that standpoint.
[00:11:17] I think the oncologist was so upset too, because she was right around the same age. She had just had a baby herself.
[00:11:26] So it's almost like looking at the mirror, looking in the mirror and seeing yourself and the possibility of something that might happen to you.
[00:11:38] It was really hard. It was hard for all of us.
[00:11:42] So hard.
[00:11:45] The one thing about Kate, though, is she is resilient. She was so resilient, she started calling around.
[00:11:56] She called every doctor everywhere.
[00:12:00] She ended up going to the University of Michigan to talk to their practice, brain tumor practice.
[00:12:08] She ended up at Metro here in Grand Rapids. And Metro is also assimilated with the U. With U of M.
[00:12:18] So she. She picked out a good oncologist after our oncology doctor had left the practice and she still kept in contact with me, though. She called me all the time to tell me things that were going on with her, to ask me questions, to find out if there were any new procedures.
[00:12:43] The neurosurgeon would still see her on a regular basis. We would follow her mri.
[00:12:50] We were in close contact with her, as much as we possibly could be, and she was still going along.
[00:13:00] She got diagnosed in the year 2020, right before COVID Another horrible thing that happened with COVID right?
[00:13:13] These patients that are getting diagnosed with these terminal illnesses, and it's just so hard to be able to take care of them sometimes. The doctors didn't want to come into the office.
[00:13:29] They were doing zoom calls with them.
[00:13:32] We're in the office, but we can't do much. The ancillary staff.
[00:13:38] It was just a trying, trying time.
[00:13:42] And Kate was devastated when the oncologist ended up leaving. And she did leave in the middle of COVID And nobody could blame her, really. It was just a horrible situation all the way around for everyone involved.
[00:13:59] But she continued to fight.
[00:14:02] She fought long and hard.
[00:14:07] And then finally, in September of 2022, might have been in earlier than that, but it seems like it was right around there.
[00:14:22] Her MRI showed that her brain tumor had started to grow back, and she was panicked by it. Why wouldn't she be?
[00:14:36] It's not a good thing when the tumor starts to grow back.
[00:14:42] We were really upset, all of us, about it, but she came into the office and she talked to the neurosurgeon.
[00:14:52] We had two neurosurgeons that did a special procedure called an ablation.
[00:15:00] An ablation is almost like cauterizing a vein so that it stops the bleeding. So it would actually go in and cauterize where the brain tumor was starting to regrow.
[00:15:18] The fact that it was in the midline, the brain is really hard because it's between both hemispheres, and it can cause symptoms on both sides of the brain. So talking movement, there were just so many things that were impacted because it was hitting both sides. It wasn't like having a stroke or even a brain tumor. Just on one side, because on one side of the brain, we can at least manage it. We know the specific areas where the brain functions so we can deal with it. But this was in the midline, so it could impact both sides.
[00:16:07] So she came in and she met with the neurosurgeon, and he brought one of the specialty surgeons and that said he thought he could do the cauterization for her.
[00:16:20] And we didn't know how it was gonna go.
[00:16:24] We were just hoping that everything would work its way out.
[00:16:30] It was really like the last ditch effort, and she knew she had to go for it. She had a two year old, two and a half year old.
[00:16:42] So we made the surgical arrangements and everything, and she had the procedure and it was hard.
[00:16:54] It was really hard.
[00:16:56] She couldn't really talk right away.
[00:17:00] She was completely out of it for a couple weeks at least.
[00:17:05] We finally ended up sending her to a rehab, and I would even visit her at the rehab.
[00:17:14] I didn't care, just to see how she was doing.
[00:17:20] She did wake up, but it was almost like she had a stroke.
[00:17:26] She could talk, but it was hard to understand her. But she knew you were present.
[00:17:33] So I would try to get over there once a week, once every couple weeks, just to keep trying to get her spirits up.
[00:17:44] She stayed in the rehab for about three months, and her husband made all the adjustments at home for her to be able to come home.
[00:17:57] You know, they had to figure out the doorways to make sure a wheelchair could get in there, and they had to adjust the bathroom so she'd be able to, you know, get into a tub. They were going to need home health care for her.
[00:18:16] And although she got to go home, the whole thing was just so heartbreaking.
[00:18:24] I remember so many times just being so sad about the whole situation and wondering why we couldn't have had a better outcome.
[00:18:38] I talked to her mom a lot. Her mom was an amazing and still is an amazing person.
[00:18:46] And she told me that Kate knew that this was a possibility of happening to her, but there was just no other choice and she had to go for it.
[00:19:04] I think that gave me a little peace of mind.
[00:19:08] But did it give everybody else a peace of mind?
[00:19:11] Your whole life changed. Her parents, her brother, her daughter, her husband.
[00:19:22] It was hard. It was really, really hard.
[00:19:26] One of the hardest things that I've lived through when I was working there.
[00:19:32] She died in January of 2023.
[00:19:37] So she had lived three years with that brain tumor and been through a whole heck of a lot.
[00:19:45] And in the summer, they had one of the most amazing celebration of life events that I have ever been to in my life.
[00:19:58] I want to tell you, it took every effort for me to go.
[00:20:04] I just didn't want to go. I just couldn't accept it. I don't know what my problem was. It's not like I hadn't been dealing with this for, you know, five years, but it. I don't know. I loved her. I just loved her.
[00:20:21] And it just didn't seem right.
[00:20:24] But I packed myself up and I went to that event, the Celebration of Life event.
[00:20:33] They had a tent, it was in a big park and they had a big tent put up. And that tent had pictures of her and. And photo albums of her.
[00:20:49] And her dad was from China, so they had origami birds there as souvenirs. I still have the orange origami on my desk that I got from that Celebration of Life. I look at it every day and I think of her.
[00:21:11] She loved the color orange cuz she was born in the fall. And I love the color orange cuz I was born in the fall. Her daughter loved the color yellow. So they had made the tent yellow and orange.
[00:21:27] Such a great tribute.
[00:21:29] There were so many people there.
[00:21:32] There were so many people there and it was just wonderful, a wonderful way to get closure.
[00:21:42] Even though I was fighting against closure with all my might.
[00:21:50] When I left there, I remember thinking to myself, I'm really so happy I came.
[00:21:58] I talked to her mom, I met her dad, I talked to her husband.
[00:22:03] I got introduced to some of her friends.
[00:22:08] I don't usually go to funerals because I've been to. I would be going to funerals every week while I was working there.
[00:22:18] So I made it a point not to really go.
[00:22:22] But the Celebration of Life was definitely something special and it's something that I'm never going to forget.
[00:22:35] I'm sure most of you are thinking that this is the end of the story, but actually it's not the end of the story.
[00:22:49] I came home and probably A month or two later I do my 10 mile walk every day and I was doing my walk and all of a sudden I started getting a message. It's like mental telepathy almost. And I know this probably sounds crazy to most of you, but I've been living with a little bit of a gift. I've had a gift for a long time.
[00:23:24] I talked to one of the nuns about it because I thought, am I crazy?
[00:23:30] And she's like, no, Don, the Holy Spirit is coming to give you messages.
[00:23:35] This is a gift. You're lucky.
[00:23:39] So I get goosebumps when there's somebody trying to give me a message. This has happened to me many times, but this time it was almost like I heard a voice talking to me and I knew it was Kate.
[00:23:58] And she kept saying to me, you have to call my mom.
[00:24:04] You have to call my mom. And I remember thinking, what the heck, you have to call my mom and you have to tell her she has to take care of herself.
[00:24:17] You have to tell her that.
[00:24:20] I went to the nun. I went to go see the nun because I thought, am I crazy?
[00:24:27] What is wrong?
[00:24:29] You know? So I told her the whole story, said, I'm gonna call her up out of the clear blue after her daughter dies and tell her, I have a message for you. She's gonna think I'm nuts.
[00:24:41] And the nun said to me, dawn, you don't have to put it like that. You don't have to say to her, I'm getting a message from you, from your daughter. You can say to her, oh, I just had an inkling about you, and I wanted to check on you to make sure that you were doing okay, because I know how hard this has all been on you.
[00:25:07] So I'm like, okay, all right. You're right. Why couldn't I just say that? That's the right thing to do. I'm really going to think about it.
[00:25:16] But every single morning, I was walking, and every single morning, I was getting this voice in my head, and I was getting the goosebumps.
[00:25:27] So I knew there was something to it, and I was gonna have to see it through to the end.
[00:25:34] And finally, I got up enough courage to call her mom.
[00:25:42] And her mom answered the phone.
[00:25:45] That was good, right?
[00:25:47] She answered the phone, but I was still thinking, what am I gonna say to her when the mom. When her mom answered the phone? Am I gonna tell her the truth, or am I going to tell her what Sister? The sister told me I could tell her.
[00:26:03] And I go, I'm just going to say the truth. I know it sounds crazy, but I'm telling her the truth.
[00:26:10] So I said, I just wanted to check on you.
[00:26:14] She said, you're so thoughtful, Dawn. I really appreciate you calling me.
[00:26:20] Well, there's more to it than that. I said I wanted to check on you because Kate keeps coming to see me. She's like, what? Yes. I said, I know this sounds crazy. I don't want you to think I'm crazy. I'm really not crazy. But she's been giving me messages that I need to call you and tell you that you have to take care of yourself.
[00:26:49] It's important for you to take care of yourself. And I get these goosebumps. Like right now while I'm talking to you, I'm getting these goosebumps. And the nun told me, that's the Holy Spirit.
[00:27:03] So I have had to call you.
[00:27:06] She said.
[00:27:08] I said, I hope you don't think I'm crazy. And she said, don, no, I don't I know exactly what you're talking about. I said, you do? She said, yes, I do.
[00:27:22] I haven't even wanted to get out of bed.
[00:27:25] I haven't wanted to do anything.
[00:27:28] I am not taking care of myself at all.
[00:27:32] And the real truth is we have that little girl.
[00:27:37] I have to take care of myself. She told me that.
[00:27:42] So the fact that she told you to call me is a reinforcement that this is really true.
[00:27:49] And you know what? If you get any more messages from her, I want you to call me.
[00:27:57] I said, really? She said, yes, you can call me anytime you get a message from her and I will 100% believe in you.
[00:28:09] We chatted for a little while longer and then we hung up.
[00:28:17] Now, while I was doing this podcast, and especially when I got to the part about calling her mom, I got those goosebumps again.
[00:28:29] And I haven't really heard from her since I made that call.
[00:28:35] So in my mind, I did the right thing and I think she feels happy.
[00:28:47] We all miss you, Kate.
[00:28:56] Thank you for listening to my podcast.
[00:28:59] I hope you enjoyed it.
[00:29:03] If you have a story that you would like me to share or you would like to be interviewed, you can go on my Facebook page or Instagram, either one.
[00:29:15] And the email address is dawn milkman.comm I L K M O N and dawn is spelled D A W N not D O N.
[00:29:30] And then send me a message that way and I will definitely get back to you.
[00:29:38] I'm still in the process of selling my canvas bags, so if you're interested in that, you can also email me through the website that way.
[00:29:48] Same email address, dawnmilkmon.com and I will definitely get back to you and I ship them out quickly, so I hope you'll try one out. I think you won't be disappointed.
[00:30:08] Until the next time.
