Brett Morton dies of cancer at 20

Brett “Bubba” Morton is pictured with his guide dog.
— Photo furnished

As Eddyvillians relaxed Sunday following the 47th celebration of the founding of the new town, friends and family carried Brett Morton to his final rest.
Morton, known as “Bubba,” died at 10:18 p.m. Thursday at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital in Nashville, Tenn. He was 20 years old. And he had fought cancer for at least seven of those years beginning when he was 2 months old.
Morton was the youngest of Steve and Sherry Morton’s three children.
At 2 months, doctors diagnosed Morton with retinoblastoma, and surgeons at the prestigious eye center at the Hannaman Hospital in Philadelphia removed his right eye. But doctors continued to treat tumors in his left eye until he was nearly 5, his mother said in an April interview.
“When he was 5, his other eye was removed because the cancer came back in a very aggressive way,” she explained.
“I can remember losing my vision — things getting very blurry in my left eye,” Brett Morton told the Herald Ledger in an interview three years ago as he prepared to participate in the survivors lap at the annual Relay for Life.
About six months after losing his left eye, doctors found a brain tumor, and Morton underwent chemotherapy. “He turned 6 right after he finished the chemo,” his mother said in April.
He was cancer free for 13 years — ages 6 to 19.
Despite losing his sight, Morton’s personality was upbeat. He was an average happy, playful child, teenager and young man who happened to be blind, his family and friends have said. He started learning Braille at the Kentucky School for the Blind in Louisville as a 5-year-old kindergartner. And his parents took night classes to learn Braille so they could help him in school. He attended classes at Lyon County schools from Head Start to ninth grade.
He was multitalented and an accomplished drummer.
He graduated from the School for the Blind in 2007, and had completed his freshman year at the University of Louisville and moved into his own apartment when he was stricken with osteoblastic osteosarcoma (bone cancer) last year.
“He was having jaw pain; he was having trouble opening his mouth and (doctors) did a biopsy and found out it was cancer,” Sherry Morton said in the earlier interview.
He then underwent six months of chemotherapy at Vanderbilt. Removal of part of his jaw revealed the cancer was still active, and he underwent another round of chemo before deciding to discontinue it.
“It was one of the worst chemos there is; he was sick for six months,” his mother said, noting at that point, the tumor was pressing on a nerve.
Morton then decided to try alternative medicine, and earlier this year he underwent two rounds of alternative treatment at the Alpha Medical Clinic in Rosarita Beach, Baja California,Mexico, 17 miles south of the U.S.-Mexican border. Immediately thereafter, he went to the Camelot Cancer Center in Tulsa, Okla. for treatment of a tumor in a lymph node.
During the alternative treatments in Mexico and in Oklahoma, Morton was optimistic.
“I can already sense a small change in the shape of the tumor,” he told the Herald Ledger in a mid-April interview from Tulsa.
He was receiving two-hour intravenous outpatient treatments of DMSO (dimehtyl sulfoxide) daily. At the time, he said the only problems he was having were a low energy level and a little pain.
In the end, none of the treatments halted the cancer, and Morton spent most of his last weeks hospitalized at Vanderbilt.
In an e-mail to friends and family early last week, Sherry Morton revealed that her son had commented that he “really did not know what his purpose in life had been.”
“I told him that people forget me, but once they meet him, they never forget him,” she said. “I also told him that I didn’t know how many papers had been written about him for school and college.”
During his last week, Morton talked with doctors regarding procedures to keep him alive. His mother said: “I personally do not know what they discussed, but I do know that there were two doctors and a social worker in tears when they left his room, even though he had them laughing as well.”