NEGRIL, Westmoreland – JULY 17 will be a difficult day for the family of 11-year-old Abrianna “Abri” Reynolds. In an ideal world they would be celebrating her birthday. This year, they will gather for her funeral. The young girl lost her battle with brain cancer on June 30, six days before she was to graduate from Mount Airy Primary & Infant School.

She died at Cornwall Regional Hospital in Montego Bay where she was being treated for an aggressive brain tumour.

Abri had been looking forward to taking up her spot at Grange Hill High School, earned through the hard work she did in the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) exams.

“She never stopped, although she was sick. And even when she could not walk, her friends carried her on their backs – even the PEP day,” her mother Indira Lawrence told the Jamaica Observer.

The family’s nightmare began soon after the Easter holidays when Abri fainted at school and then was unable to move the right side of her body. Suddenly she was transformed from a happy young girl with not a care in the world to someone in urgent need of medical care.

She was rushed to Savanna-la-Mar Public General Hospital in Westmoreland where she spent almost a month undergoing a barrage of tests. Abri was then transferred to Cornwall Regional Hospital in St James where doctors broke the news to the family that there was nothing they could do to save her.

Refusing to give up without a fight, Abri’s relatives tried to access medical care overseas. They had seen the help fire victim Adrianna Laing, Abri’s 14-year-old cousin, had received beyond Jamaica’s borders.

“Where it was, they could not do anything. They said it is the first time that they are seeing a case like this here. It was so aggressive. It was at stage four,” Abri’s grieving mother told Observer West.

She said her daughter handled the news a lot better than she did.

“She knew that she was dying. She accepted it and was not afraid. She was brave, braver than me. I am the one always crying and she is comforting me. She was always patting me and saying, ‘Mommy, don’t cry,’ ” relayed a teary-eyed Lawrence.

“When I talked to her she said, ‘Yes Mommy, I know that I am dying,” she added, her voice heavy with sorrow.

Her grief is made even heavier by questions she has about the care Abri received towards the end of her all-too-brief life. With surgery and chemotherapy ruled out, she was receiving radiation therapy, an attempt to extend the time she had left.

Therapy was supposed to run from June 6 to July 17 but relatives said she missed six days of treatment because of a broken machine at the hospital. This alarmed her family, as medical advice before treatment began was that Abri should never miss a session once treatment started.

The six days the young girl missed were from June 19-25. Her treatment resumed on Monday, June 26 and continued up to Wednesday, June 28. On Thursday the 29th she was very weak and, according to relatives, medical professionals advised against radiation therapy and instead sent her for an examination. Based on the results, Abri was admitted to hospital. Her mother was there with her well into the night. The young girl died the following morning.

Though grateful for the help received from medical professionals her mother is still wondering if something went wrong.

“I don’t know if, in the first place, the radiation was too much for her brain or is because the machine broke down that set her back,” said Lawrence.

But even as she wonders why and grieves the loss of her child, she takes comfort in the thought that Abri was on earth to fulfil a purpose. She used herself as an example of the difference her daughter made. It was because of Abri, she told Observer West, that she recently turned her life over to God.

“I did not know that she knew so many people and so many people knew her. She is a very friendly little girl. It is like she is an angel who came for a time and she did her time and is gone. She just touched you,” said Lawrence.