EDMONTON- A brave, young Edmonton woman is continuing to fight for her life, despite receiving devastating news about her battle with cancer.
“It was a Tuesday, and I invited all of my family to come and hear the results of the scans with me and I could just tell from the look on the doctor’s face when she walked in that it wasn’t good,” Crystal Montgomery said Wednesday morning.
The 19-year-old was diagnosed with bone cancer in July 2012. Since then she has gone through countless chemotherapy and radiation treatments. She lost all of her hair and last November she lost her arm.
“I didn’t want to go out in public. I wanted to hide. I didn’t want people to see me.”
After her surgery, Montgomery began planning her life again. But in February, things took a turn for the worse.
“(The doctor) said there’s no more options here … there’s nothing left for us to do in order to treat you,” Montgomery said. “I sat there screaming and yelling for a really long time because I couldn’t believe that when I first got diagnosed, I believed I had so many options and I had lots of things that I could do. And all of a sudden there was nothing.”
“I never said no to anything. I took every single treatment. I got sick like there was no tomorrow. I let them take my arm. I let them take my lung and I’m still possibly not going to make it and I don’t understand how that works.”
But, she hasn’t given up hope. Montgomery is still going about her daily life, seizing every opportunity, “because what’s the point in waiting anymore.”
Montgomery has been looking into other treatment options, including one in Mexico. On Saturday, her and her family will be hosting the ‘Angels for Crystal’ barbecue in hopes of raising funds for the trip. It will be held at the Slovenian Cultural Centre at 11:00 a.m.
“I have this really, really weird feeling that we’re still going to be able to find something and I feel like there’s things still left out there for me, because I’m still planning my future. I’m still doing whatever I want and I’m trying to fulfill my bucket list.
“A lot of them are really little, like I want to go horseback riding. I want to go on a balloon ride. I want to ride on the back of a motorcycle.”
And while doing all of this, she’s not even worried about herself.
“My parents have to go on living without me, and the rest of my family and my 12-year-old little brother has to go through the fact that his sister is going to die,” Montgomery said, holding back tears.
“I’m so sure that wherever I’m going to go, I’m not going to be in pain any more. I’m not going to be suffering, but everybody else is going to be and that just seems so wrong. That seems so incredibly wrong that I get to be okay and they don’t.”
With files from Su-Ling Goh, Global News.
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