ANOTHER MOTHER’S DAY WITH DAUGHTER
Cancer diagnosis changed local nurse’s perspective on life
Mother’s Day takes on a whole new meaning when your 9-year old daughter is diagnosed with a brain tumor.
That is where Karen Jabczenski found herself in May 2019 when her daughter, Ava, said she had a headache after a Saturday morning soccer game. Forty-eight hours later she was at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor undergoing a craniotomy to remove a racquet ball-sized tumor from her right frontal lobe.
Ava was diagnosed with an Atypical Teratoid Rhabdoid Tumor, which is typically found in children under age 3 and represents only 1% of childhood brain tumors.
“There were never any symptoms or signs of what was happening to her,” said Jabczenski. “It came as a shock to our whole family.”
Jabczenski is a nurse in the Pediatric
Hematology and Oncology Clinic at Royal Oak Beaumont Hospital. She has seen hundreds of patients struggle with cancer in her seven years, but now it was part of her family’s life.
Over the next three years Ava went through multiple radiation and chemotherapy treatments, participated in several trial drug treatments and had two more craniotomies.
Her most recent scans have been “positive,” according to her mother, and Ava continues to persevere.
“I think Ava is stronger than she knows and she has handled all this very well,” Jabczenski said. “I keep her life as normal as possible and we try to put as much of a positive spin on it as we can.”
This year Ava and her 16 year-old sister Kaitlyn will enjoy another Mother’s Day with their mom, but in her eyes she is appreciative of every day spent with her children.
“Every day that we have with Ava is a blessing; not just Mother’s Day,” said Jabczenski. “Mother’s Day is just another day to be grateful that I still have my daughters in my life.”
Ava has kept up with her eighth grade classmates at St. Frances Cabrini in Allen Park and continues to play sports as much as possible. Soccer and basketball are her favorites.
“She has always just wanted to be part of the team and her coaches would put her in as much as possible and afterward she felt amazing,” Jabczenski said.
Jabczenski said that she has a new perspective on her work at the Beaumont clinic and how to relate with other parents whose children have received a cancer diagnosis.
“I learned from my patients how to get through the last three years,” she said. “I thought I knew what parents were going through and I didn’t. You don’t know it until you go through it yourself. Now I can reach them on a different level.”