A terminally ill father was able to hug his son before his football game one last time, thanks to a nurse who stepped in to get a pilot to fly him to the away game.
Doctors diagnosed Scott Sullivan of Somerset, Kentucky, with a rare cancer this August after he was admitted to the hospital for abnormal test results. The disease is called leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, a complication of cancer where the disease spreads to the spinal cord and the brain.
Even with treatment, life expectancy is approximately two to four months, according to a fact sheet from the National Institutes of Health.
Doctors gave Sullivan a few weeks to live and discharged him to hospice care.
While Sullivan continued to battle his illness at home, all he had was one wish: to live long enough to watch his son play his first football game of his sophomore year.
So he asked Jerree Humphrey, his nurse who works for Hospice of Lake Cumberland, if that would be possible.
At first, the request was not possible because it was a three-and-a-half-hour drive to get to the away game. But things worked out when Humphrey reached out to a local airport, and within days, local dentist Dr. Denny Brummett offered his personal plane to fly Sullivan to the game.
“Words could not be put into sentences or phrases to describe how I felt at that time,” he said. “I was just so happy to see my son.”
On September 11, Brummett, Humphrey, Sullivan, and his girlfriend boarded the plane for the big game.
They sat on a hill separate from where the fans were sitting as an extra precaution. When Sullivan’s son Cade saw his father, he ran up the hill and hugged his father tightly.
“You could just not help but cry,” Humphrey said. “He just embraced him so hard and was just so thankful for him to be there.”
Sullivan hopes he will get the opportunity to witness his son’s next football game on Saturday.
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