September - St. Augustine Catholic

all of her hair fell out. She couldn’t keep
down any food because her digestive system
had shut down. In an effort to keep her
body nourished Kara received TPN – Total
Parenteral Nutrition – a combination
of nutrients and liquids administered
intravenously. She ate nothing for more than
a year. Her weight dropped to less than 70
pounds.
“My mom was helping me out of the bath
one day, and looking at me she said I looked
like a skeleton,” Kara said. “She thought at
the time that I was going to die.”
This summer, Kara worked as a camp counselor for the Summer
Spectacular program of St. Johns County. The young girls attending
the camp said they look up to Kara and love being with her.
SCOTT SMITH
That bit of medical detective work may
have saved Kara’s life.
Jane Masson asked Kara’s pediatrician to
order an MRI of Kara’s brain. The results of
the scan showed Kara had a brain tumor
near her brain stem.
Three days after her MRI, in August 2000,
Kara was wheeled into an operating room at
Wolfson Children’s Hospital in Jacksonville
to have the tumor removed. She went
into surgery with the prayers of dozens of
fellow Catholics at St. Anastasia Parish in St.
Augustine with her.
St. Anastasia, says Kara, is a very close-knit
parish, where many of the families know
each other.
“I know when I was sick there were a lot of
prayers offered up for me,” she said. “People
who didn’t even know me but knew my
situation were praying for me.”
Doctors thought initially that the golfball
size tumor was benign. Once Kara’s
surgery was underway, they found it was
much more serious. Kara had a tumor called
Medulloblastoma.
Medulloblastoma is the most common
primary central nervous system tumor that
appears in childhood. It frequently occurs
in an area between the brain stem and the
cerebellum. It is an aggressive, fast-growing
tumor, which can, if left untreated, spread
to the spinal cord and other organs in the
body. It is treated with a combination of
surgery, to remove the tumor, radiation
and chemotherapy to keep the tumor from
returning.
After a week’s hospital stay following the
surgery, Kara was sent home to recover for
the next round of treatments. She had six
weeks of radiation therapy, five days a week
at Baptist Cancer Institute in Jacksonville.
Kara also began chemotherapy at the same
time. The chemotherapy was administered
intravenously once a week for 18 months.
Once a month, Kara would receive
two stronger treatments that required
hospitalization at Nemours Children’s Clinic.
One was an intravenous fluid, the other was
a tablet with medication so strong Jane had
to wear rubber gloves when handling it;
otherwise it would burn her skin.
“We would go into the hospital for 24
hours and not really sleep because we dealt
with the chemo,” said Jane. “We got into a
routine. We would rent whatever movies
we were hoping to see and take them to the
hospital and watch movies for 24 hours.”
Twenty percent of children undergoing
treatment for Medulloblastoma sometimes
develop severe, sometimes irreversible
neurological problems, including loss of
speech and difficulties maintaining balance.
After her surgery, Kara found that she had
trouble standing and walking.
“My balance was off and I probably
would have recovered, if I didn’t have to
undergo radiation and chemo
right away,” she said. “The
treatments made me really,
really weak.”
The combination of
radiation treatment and
chemotherapy ravaged Kara’s body. She
was in a wheelchair, unable to walk, and
“I really didn’t feel like I was going to die,
but some days I felt so horrible that I wished
I would,” she said.
Kara describes her ordeal as strengthening
her faith and making her a stronger
Christian. One incident, during a hospital
stay for chemotherapy, she recalls with
particular clarity.
It was late at night. Kara felt awful, as
usual. She was unable to sleep. Kara forced
herself to close her eyes, thinking she would
eventually fall asleep.
“Almost immediately, I felt like someone
was holding me, like a mother holding
a baby,” she says, her voice barely above
a whisper. “It was just the most amazing
feeling I’ve ever had, and there’s no doubt
A sophomore at Flagler College,
Kara plans to teach young children
at her former R.B. Hunt Elementary
School on Anastasia Island.
SCOTT SMITH
20 St. Augustine Catholic September 2006
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