Kaden Spencer, a Battle Ground teen, overcame a lot in order to walk across the stage for high school graduation.
Spencer saw his senior year turned upside down following a brain cancer diagnosis that resulted in him staying at St. Jude Children's Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.
Last August, Spencer began experiencing headaches and constantly feeling dizzy, leading his mother, Dawn Rasmussen, to make an appointment with his doctor. During the appointment, their doctor decided to schedule an MRI.
“Thank God we went in for the MRI,” Rasmussen said in a previous interview with The Reflector. “That night, we got a phone call saying to get him up to OHSU (Oregon Health and Science University), he has a tumor. And so we went up there, and then they transferred us over to the Sunnyside Hospital, and the next night he was having brain surgery.”
Spencer was diagnosed with medulloblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer that occurs on the lower left side of the brain. The diagnosis and required treatment would force Spencer to miss out on his senior year of high school.
Spencer was able to meet the requirements to graduate with the rest of the class of 2025 from Battle Ground High School through online education.
“It means a lot because he had such a rough time,” Rasmussen said of watching him walk across the stage. “You know, going through chemo and everything and he had a wheelchair and couldn’t walk and throwing up every day and watching him come here, and now he’s back to himself.”
Rasmussen and Spencer relocated for the majority of the school year to Memphis, Tennessee, for radiation treatment, totaling over an eight-month stay at St. Jude’s.
“You see the commercials on TV and you hear about it, but you don’t realize just how amazing they are until you go there,” she said in the previous article.
Rasmussen said when her son’s name was called to walk across the stage and receive his diploma, she was proud he made it to this point.
“We’re just happy he was here and alive and made it,” she said. “We met so many families there that didn’t end up being able to come out of there.”
Rasmussen and Spencer will go back to St. Jude’s on June 21 to continue treatments and exams every three months for the next two years. She added that this couldn’t have been possible without the support of the greater Battle Ground community.
Rasmussen had previously held a fundraiser to cover outside costs and her bills back in Battle Ground before they embarked on the eight-month stay at St. Jude’s that began last year.
