Losing a child to brain cancer

he realised I was getting upset he said God was with them and I shook my head.

“I said why would you say something like that in front of me and he said he didn’t mean to say it like that but, ‘there is nothing more we can do for her’…”

Kiana was discharged on November 8. By November 12, she had to be rushed back to the hospital because her breathing had become irregular and she had stopped swallowing. There, she was fed and given her medication through a tube and sent home the same day. But by the following day she was back at the hospital as her breathing was laboured.

“As soon as we reached they told me to take her inside and they immediately put her on oxygen... They had tests done and wanted to do another x-ray, she had done one the day before. They waited a little while before they got the x-ray done... They requested a CT scan and I was wondering why a CT scan now. I asked why is a CT scan needed, and her [the doctor’s] words to me was that the cancer had spread to her lungs. I said ‘What? Hold up!’ I said, ‘What you mean?’ And she said from the x-ray it show that one side is dark and one is light and it mean the cancer had spread to the lung area which affected her breathing,” the mother said.

Mitchell said she questioned why this was not picked up the previous day and the doctor said she could not answer.

“I am thinking they saw it, but did not want to tell me as a mother. I got annoyed and stressed out and frustrated. Her father was there and he was trying to keep me calm because I am a pressure case,” she said.

Eventually Kiana was admitted to the paediatric ward, where she was not only on oxygen but a life-support machine and her breathing fluctuated.

‘I knew’

“To be honest, I knew that this was going to happen, but I was not accepting it because I was doing what I could have done to keep her alive and I think if the doctors had the same mentality she would have been alive today,” Mitchell said. “During the night [of November 13], her saturation kept going down, it went straight down to zero and stayed there for five seconds, went up back to 40something. I got really scared and started crying. So happen, I started praying and saying Psalms and hoping for a miracle that she was going to pull through.”

At one point, she recalled Kiana looking at her with tears rolling down her cheeks and that made her cry even more.

“I know she was in pain because she was groaning and making noise,” she said.

At around 3 am on November 14, Mitchell’s sister relieved her so she could get some sleep. At 6 am she woke up to her mother’s voice and they started to pray and recite the Psalms.

“I started praying, ‘Father God don’t take her now, I am not ready for her to go…’ with tears in my eyes. Her saturation went down to 0 and never came up. She took a large blow and blood gushed out from her left side nose and that was it, that was the last time she looked at me,” Mitchell recalled.

“I broke down and fell to my knees on the floor and my stomach started to hurt. I was told that happens when you lose a child and it was the worst pain and I cried and cried. I removed the machine and I put her on my lap and I prayed for her but she still didn’t wake up back. She looked like she was sleeping but had no pulse and she was in my hands and started to get really cold, her feet were cold...

“I couldn’t stop crying. I cried the entire morning. A lot of persons who knew [were] in disbelief how everything happened.”

In her grief, Mitchell believed that more could have been done to save her daughter as she spoke of trying to garner finances to take her overseas for further treatment. She had started a GoFundMe campaign, but it was largely unsuccessful as people wanted quotations from hospitals, which she did not have.

Kiana’s two-year-old brother, who called her ‘Ana,’ has been asking for her and Mitchell said she had to tell him his sister has gone to heaven.

“Kiana was very special. She has touched so many people. A lot of persons who had never met her really felt for her. There is Makeda Sullivan, who is a nurse in training. She first met Kiana when she was first diagnosed and ever since she was by our side helping us through everything.

The Sunday she died I was taking them to church to offer both of them and she was going to be the godmother,” Mitchell said.

“Everything I would have achieved for her in the short time was to make her happy,” the mother said.

She shared that she had held a thanksgiving and Christmas party for her daughter during her illness, following a request from Kiana. She received negative feedback as some felt she was wasting money.

“I had a lot of negative comments saying, ‘you wasting money’. I spent the money on toys for her and some people brought toys. I knew what I was doing. I did my best but somehow I feel in my heart I didn’t do enough,” she said close to tears.

Mitchell said she was told that her daughter could have been born with the tumor and the fall triggered it, or it could have been caused by that fall back in December 2020.

She will never know.

“I agree to speak about my experience because many persons who didn’t know me were following Kiana’s story from the very beginning and I know they are hurting. That is why I kept updating on my Facebook page…,” she said.

“Many accused me of using my child to get money. That was never the case. I was just a mother trying to make her sick daughter better.”

Kiana will be buried today.