The holidays should be filled with joy and gift-giving, but for one local family this holiday season will be filled with costly medical bills and a debilitating sickness.
Kohner Thompson, an eight-year-old student at Huntington Elementary, likes to play football and attend church, and he has led a normal life until recently.
The young boy’s life was flipped upside down when Kohner was diagnosed with a cyst on the center of his brain this summer.
It all began when Kohner started involuntarily rolling his eyes around June of this year. At first, his parents and doctor thought it was just an attitude problem, but several months later Kohner was admitted to the emergency room for a severe headache. It was there in the emergency room when he had his first full seizure.
“They did a CAT scan immediately,” Ashley said. “And that’s when they found the cyst in his brain.”
A CAT scan, or computerized tomography scan, is an x-ray image made of the brain.
Doctors advised the Thompsons to schedule an appointment with a neurologist in Houston to have an electroencephalogram (EEG), a test evaluating electrical activity in the brain, so they scheduled an appointment at Texas Children’s Hospital.
“In our heads, we thought we were going down there for an EEG,” Ashley said. “That’s all we were going down there for.”
But as Ashley and Kohner were getting prepped for the exam, certain things kept alarming her.
“[The doctor] walks out of the room and comes back with a guy he introduces as the head of the neurology department at Texas Children’s, which was alarming, but they assured us nothing was wrong,” Ashley said. “They kept looking at each other, and I said, ‘Is everything OK?’”
While they were waiting for the results, the doctors told Ashley and Kohner they could leave and they would hear the results later of the EEG, but before they reached the parking lot, a group of doctors stopped them and said the results were back.
As they sat in a waiting room, preparing to hear the results, a woman approached Ashley, handed her a business card, and said to contact her if she needed anything. The card identified the woman as a grief counselor.
Ashley said she hit the ground in tears.
“That’s your kid,” Ashley said. “You can’t not know what the actual results are and someone hand you a grief card. Like, that’s just not OK.”
Finally, the doctors brought them into a private office and said there were aggressive brain waves on the central part of Kohner’s brain. They wanted to do an immediate MRI to further understand it. The MRI later showed Kohner had a two mm cyst on his pineal gland.
Ashley described the pineal gland as “literally the dead center of your brain” and the “worst place for brain surgery.” Because of this, the doctors believe it would be more harmful to remove the cyst than to let it remain.
Currently, Kohner is battling strep throat again, and Ashley said that whenever he is sick with fever, his seizures spiral out of control.
Unfortunately, medical costs have proven too much for the Thompsons to bear. At first, they thought they might need to cancel Christmas, but some friends said they would provide gifts.
However, their struggle is not over.
They have declared bankruptcy and need support this holiday season as medical bills keep piling up.
“A lot of business that we’ve gone to for donations have all turned us away because it’s Christmas and the end of the year,” Ashley said.
Business owners told her she should have come to them at the beginning of the year, but Kohner did not get sick until late summer. However the problem is now, and the Thompsons need support.
“It’s been really emotional and hard on me as a mom because when your kids are sick you just want to be able to give them medicine or one thing and it go away completely, and right now we can’t do that,” Ashley said. “We go to church, we pray. He prays before every meal and at bedtime, and every time he prays, the first prayer that comes out of his mouth is that he wishes his cyst and seizures would go away.”
The Thompsons are selling t-shirts with #KohnerStrong on them to show support for the young boy and to raise funds for medical costs. To purchase one, Ashley can be contacted through Facebook at facebook.com/Kohner415. Also on that page, readers can follow Kohner’s journey.
To donate to the Thompsons, visit gofundme.com/Kohner-strong or their PayPal account at paypal.me/kohner415.
