Just 48 hours before her due date – and, by her own admission, looking “for any reason to go to the hospital” to have her first baby, Kristin Sumbot woke up with a headache.
A subsequent MRI showed there was a mass on her brain.
The days that followed were a whirlwind totally at odds with every new parent’s expectations for the instant they meet their child.
Kristin had an emergency C-section. Still, and while shrouded in terrifying uncertainty, she savoured those early experiences as every mother does: “That moment that the nurse brought him over to me,” she explains in a heart-wrenching video recently put together to document her story. “It’s a really infinite love; he’s a piece of my heart.”
Tragically, following rounds of tests, the news that she and her husband were met with was not good: one of the most aggressive and deadly forms of cancer was sitting inside her skull and she had just a 5 percent chance of living more than 14 months.
Ms Sumbot had already beaten leukaemia five years previously, but she recognised that this time her prognosis was far bleaker.
“I had all these visions of being a normal mom, of spending all this time with him,” she says through tears.
“I want to take August to his first day at school; I want to be there when he comes home and gets off the bus... I want to be that mom for him.”
“She wants to be here; she wants to be a mom; she wants to be a wife; a daughter; a friend,” her heartbroken husband, Nate, adds.
Her current outlook, however, is nothing short of inspiring.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen – there is no cure,” Kristen accepts. “But I can enjoy every day for what it is.”
Now, the mother-of-one says she’s “fighting” for precious moments with her family, being as strong for them as she can.
“Every day is a gift – playing with August and hearing him laugh; seeing him trying to walk and play blocks with me... and read, and him wriggling when you’re trying to change his diaper.”
You can watch Kristen’s thought-provoking video below:
