Curtis Hamilton's granddaughter gives him a reason to live
It was 11 o’clock on the night of Curtis Hamilton’s 57th birthday when he heard a knock on the door of his home in Richland, Mississippi.
His son Curtis Jr. and daughter-in-law Wendy were there. They told him, oddly enough, they had come to borrow his camcorder.
Curtis and Rosa Hamilton
Oh yeah, and first they needed to make sure it worked. They set up the camera and pushed the “Record” button.
Hamilton’s wife, Rosa Hamilton, recalls what happened next:
“They told him he was going to be a grandfather, and I thought he was going to hit the floor. He said, ‘Ya’ll just gave me something to live for.”’
Hamilton has battled both lung and liver disease related to Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency for the last 11 years. After waiting on a liver transplant list for the last two, doctors recently told him it would not be much longer before the surgery can take place.
In the past two months, Hamilton has been in and out of hospitals five times.
In 1998 he was hospitalized due to a stomach blockage. But when doctors performed a liver biopsy, they discovered he also had cirrhosis. Shortly after that, he was diagnosed with Alpha-1
Doctors urged that his family members get tested. Two of his brothers, Allen and Paul, were found to be Alphas.
Allen later died of unrelated causes. But Paul, who used an inhaler and suffered from what doctors had previously diagnosed as asthma and bronchitis, already had severe damage to the lungs. Doctors determined he could not physically withstand surgery and seven years after the diagnosis, Paul died. He was just 47.
Frequent bouts of pneumonia, and weekly augmentation therapy have since become part of Curtis Hamilton’s life.
Now 61 and wheelchair-bound, he spends most of his time at home. He watches Bonanza and other classic old shows on TV Land while Rosa cleans the house. He solves puzzles and doesn’t go a morning without reading the newspaper. Some days, he and his wife of 36 years go for a car ride to view the scenery. Other days, they sit on their front porch.
But the stresses of having Alpha-1 are a daily test of endurance.
“Having Alpha-1 is hard on him and me both,” Rosa said. “One day, we said, we have to just deal with this. But I question myself, am I doing the right thing? Am I doing everything I’m supposed to be doing?”
For 31 years, Rosa worked at the nearby Elite Restaurant, but she recently quit in order to stay home with her husband. “Every morning I get up, cook breakfast, give him his medications, see if there’s any doctor appointments,” Rosa said. “My life surrounds him. That’s all I got, he’s all I got.”
Rosa and Hamilton met in 1971. Two years later on a springtime day, they got married. Curtis Jr. was born in 1977.
At age 19, Junior got married.
For more than a decade, he and Wendy unsuccessfully tried to conceive a child. Eventually, doctors told them they would never be able to conceive. That was just a week before Curtis’ 57th birthday.
Curtis, Rosa and granddaughter Aubree
Then – within a week – came the home pregnancy test that proved the doctors wrong.
Although anxious thoughts about the surgery often cross his mind, Hamilton’s granddaughter, Aubree Isabella, now four, helps him overcome uncertainty and look forward to days spent visiting her rather than visiting doctors.
“He wants to get well for the grandbaby,” Rosa said. “God knew he needed a grandbaby.”
“She can’t get enough of us,” Hamilton said. “She wants to come to our house a lot. She loves her papa. When I saw her in the hospital, she went downstairs and cried a little bit and then she asked her to dad to go back up to give me another hug.”
He keeps a recent picture of Aubree wearing a cowboy hat near him and waits in the living room for the doctors to call.
“Now it’s going to be all up to me,” Hamilton said. “And I got my mind zeroed in.”
Thanks to helping Curtis, “I have a life again” says his sister-in-law
Rita Ramos is disabled, has not worked for 10 years and is not rich. Yet she doesn’t think twice about sharing what she has with her sister Rosa and Rosa’s husband Curtis Hamilton.
“She is mine and Curtis’s support. She calls every day, goes to every one of the doctor’s visits, pays for everything. She’s been there when nobody’s been there,” Rosa said.
Rita, 52, constantly anguishes over her brother-in-law’s health – much to his dismay.
Rita Ramos: “It makes me feel like I have a life again”
As Curtis’s physical condition has deteriorated, his bond with Rita strengthened.
“Rosa needed the support and Curtis needed the support even more, and I wanted to be there for both of them,” Rita said. “Curtis is like a brother to me, and I feel in my heart that it’s my duty to help. If there’s any way I could give him my liver, I would let him go on and have mine.”
Curtis appreciates the concern, and returns it. “She worries about me all the time,” he said. “I tell her, you don’t need to do that, you need to take care of yourself. I worry about her health.”
Rita has COPD. She smoked for about 20 years, but quit upon the diagnosis. (She has not been tested for Alpha-1.) She has bulging disks in her spine and recently received an electrocardiogram, or EKG, to find out why her chest sometimes hurts. In 1997 she underwent a triple bypass surgery of the arteries in her lower intestine.
But Rita puts her personal health problems aside, and has skipped her own doctor’s appointments to attend her brother-in-law’s.
“It makes me feel like I have a life again, going around doing things,” Rita said.
She drives the Hamiltons from their Mississippi home to see transplant specialists at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans. They always enjoy each other’s company.
“We’ve had a lot of good times. We just carry on the whole way up there, and talk about this and talk about that,” Rita said with a chuckle. “We would always go out to eat at night then take snacks to the hotel room and have a large time until Curtis says it’s time to go to bed.”
Rita and her husband Thomas pay for the travel expenses. Thomas is a service supervisor at an oil company. They stretch their modest means to help Curtis and Rosa any way they can.
“I know she’s without a job, and what little money she gets, I want her to keep,” Rita said of her sister.
Thomas, or Big Tommy as Curtis calls him, is also close to Curtis’s heart. Thomas has lifted Curtis’s self-confidence before while showing off Hamilton’s multiplication skills.
“He’d call off some numbers, and I’d multiply them off. He’d yell, ‘Ya’ll know what this guy can do over here?’ He made me feel real good,” Curtis said.
Thomas travels along with Rita and the Hamiltons every chance he gets.
Thomas “Big Tommy” Ramos
Soon, Curtis and Rosa will travel to New Orleans to receive a new liver – a trip Rita and Thomas have already packed their bags for.
“When I get ready to go for my transplant,” Curtis said, “I know I can look up and see Rita and Tommy. I know I can count on them if I can’t count on anyone else.”
