Teen Coma Survivor fulfills promise to go at graduation (exclusive)

A noise of applause and cheer echoed through Connecticuts East Haven High School’s football stadium last week when 18-year-old Bella chambas slowly crossed the midfield-flanked by his mother and a school member-to get their diploma.

“I heard everyone screaming at first,” reminds a chamb basis. “But then I stopped hearing something because I was so focused on getting over the stage and getting to the other side.”

For most teenagers, graduation from high school is a ritual that marks one of their first steps to adulthood.

For a chamb basis – which has endured more difficulties and loss than most of us encounter for a life – were the eight steps she took over the stage at her ceremony on Thursday, June 12, was the culmination of value of hard work and the fulfillment of a promise that she made shortly after coming from a coma 2021.

“I didn’t just want to be remembered as” the girl in the wheelchair, “says the 18-year-old honorary student when he asked why it was so important for her to get her diploma while standing on her two feet.” I wanted everyone there to remember me as “Bella, the girl who overcome kidney failure and survived.” ”

The story behind chambas’ Moment of Triumph is a dark, tracking back to April 2009. That’s when the family’s babysitter murdered her big sisterArianna, who was 7.

“It was a very horrible time for us, something that none of us will ever come across,” says Deann Hurley, chamb base mother.

Two years later was her father – Jorge – killed in a motorcycle accident. “It was like a blow after another,” Hurley says. “We haven’t really got the best short tire.”

Life slowly returned to normal over the coming decade. But in January 2021, Hurley saw when her usually spunky youngest daughter began to experience nasal bleeding and long -lasting relaxation.

An emergency medical doctor told a chamb basis to put Vaseline in her nose and then sent her at her home. But two days after that, she could barely stand up and began to have a hard time breathing.

Hurley rushed her to a local hospital and quickly heard: “Your daughter is very ill.”

Chambas was intubated to help her breathe and because she was so anemic had more than a dozen blood transfusions.

Tests soon revealed that she suffered from a rare autoimmune disorder known as anca-associated vasculitis, causing inflammation of blood vessels throughout the body. Not long, her kidneys failed, and she was put on dialysis.

An originally promising recovery masked a threatening problem: two months later, just as a chamb basis prepared to leave the hospital, she got a serious stroke and spent next month in a coma.

In April, the doctors began to support Hurley for the possibility that her daughter would never awaken.

“They started to have quality of life with me and explained how they could stop her dialysis and just let her kidney functions turn off,” Hurley says. “All I could think of was:“ I won’t lose two daughters in April. ”

Instead, she kept a constant awake of chambas hospital bed, played Bruno Mars and Keyshia Cole Tunes for her immediately.

And then one afternoon about a month into a coma, in the middle of Billie Eilish’s song “Copycat”, Hurley noticed that her daughter’s lips were moving. “She lip -synchronized the song word for words,” she says. “It was absolutely fantastic.”

When asked about her memories from that period, chambas simply says: “I’ve always loved music and have always learned lyrics to songs really fast. And when I like a song I always sing it no matter what.”

It took another five months before she was strong enough to be released from the hospital. Her left side had been seriously weakened by stroke and she used a wheelchair to move. “Even just sitting up,” says Hurley, “You can see the pain in her face.”

During this period, the joy of realizing that she soon survived was hardened by questions about what her life would look like in the future.

“When I finally came back, I asked myself: ‘Why does all this happen?’ “Says chambas.

She was not waiting for an answer. Instead, she threw herself into her school work, determined to catch up with all the classes she missed during the nine months total that she spent at the hospital to graduate on time.

“I’m very hard on myself when I need to do something,” she says. “So when I went back to school I did everything I could, always came home and worked at night and went to summer school.”

Between the many operations that followed, including a kidney transplant in 2023, a chamb basis was determined for a day’s walk at her degree.

And in August last year when she started twice a week physiotherapy, the first thing she told her therapist was: “I want to cross the stage to get my high school diploma.” Not long, she spent countless hours training to do over a simulated scene that her therapists had created for her.

“She needed a lot of help at first, especially to move her left leg,” says Jadean Hoff, a physiotherapist at Gaylord Special Healthcarewhich describes a chamb basis as one of the “most optimistic and hard -working patients” she has ever worked with.

“She always comes in with a smile, even when she has a shit day – and she continues until she almost drops,” says Hoff.

The hard work paid off, says chamb basis, who eventually wants to attend medical school and focus on pediatric medicine.

“Back when I was in the hospital, I heard a lot about all the things I could probably never do again,” she says. “But what I learned is: Never let anyone tell you what you can or can’t do. Just keep a good way of thinking, stay positive and there is nothing you can’t achieve.”