A dying father and son were reunited in the most emotional way by a nurse who arranged for the add to travel by plane to see his son play football one last time.
Dying man
Scott Sullivan, a native of Somerset, Kentucky, was diagnosed with a rare cancer after being admitted to the hospital for abnormal lab results in early August. He had leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, a complication of cancer in which the disease spreads to the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord.
Last wish
The doctors gave him only a few weeks to live and discharged him to hospice care. While he was being cared for at home, his last wish was to see his son’s first football game of his sophomore year at Pulaski County High School. So he requested his nurse, Jerree Humphrey of Hospice of Lake Cumberland if it would be possible.
The nurse
Sullivan and Humphrey had become friends as they had children around the same age who played sports at rival schools. Although she wanted to grant his request, she couldn’t recommend it as the first game of the season was at Belfry, a three-and-a-half-hour drive away, and not suitable for a hospice patient.
“I thought you know you’re talking seven or eight hours in the car and I said I don’t know how safe that would be or how realistic,” said Humphrey. But she reached out to a nearby airport and within days a local dentist, Dr. Denny Brummett, offered to fly Sullivan to the game on his personal plane.
“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, Humphrey, Brummett, Sullivan, and Sullivan’s girlfriend boarded the plane for game day. They sat on a hill away from the fans instead of sitting in the stands, as an extra precaution.
Happy reunion
As his son, Cade Sullivan saw him, he ran up the hill and hugged him with all his might. Scott said it was a magical moment when they created a memory that Cade will always remember even when he’s gone. “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 have the chance to make it to his son’s next football game on Saturday. We pray and ask God to give Scott Sullivan more time to spend with his family and pray for complete healing for him.