Glenn S. Robertson
Caregiver
Cheyenne, WY
Biography
Glenn S Robertson lives in Cheyenne, WY, but met the Illini 4000 team while living in Worland, WY. Glenn’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when he was only 12 years old. However, 20 years ago, breast cancer was very close to a death sentence. Glenn was only a boy at the time and he realized that he might lose his beloved mother forever. As a result of this sudden crisis, he and his father and brother came together. Because of her strength and medical treatment, Mrs. Robertson lived cancer free for more than 20 years. However, breast cancer returned in 2017, requiring a new bout of chemotherapy and radiation, along with a double mastectomy. In 2024, she was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. The treatment was unsuccessful, and she passed away in the early morning of April 6, 2025, one day after her 50th wedding anniversary. Glenn’s brother was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and successfully beat it, living cancer free ever since.
Be There
I was forced to grow up earlier than I normally would have. When you were confronted with situation like that, it made you look at the situation from an adult prospective, rather than that of 12 year old boy. I did the only thing I could, which was to be there for my mom. You do gain a stronger appreciation for life, what it means to have a family when one of your family members got something like that. Be there for them and be there as much as you can. It would be really easy to deny that it is happening, to ignore the situation. But you can’t, the person suffering is going to need you. Even if you are young, you can still help and you can make it easier for the person going through it, and they are going to need you to do that.
Come Together
It was a very trying period for the whole family. It first seemed worse than it was. But one of the biggest problems was that we were in the process of moving overseas so we were moving back and forth. So there were a number of issues that came along with that, like trying to find healthcare where English was spoken. My family has always been very tight, even though that we moved around a lot. That event has definitely strengthened our family bond. You come together in time of crisis. You either break apart or come together. At that age, my brothers and I should be trouble makers, causing problems. But instead, we wanted to make sure that my mother was alright. We did our best to come together and did what we could to help the family and my mom to get through the disease.
Be Strong
It was long months of chemotherapy, radiation treatment and a number of other medications. As a 12 year old child, you can well imagine it was hard to understand. It was hard to know what was going on, you just knew the limited information your family was telling you without worrying you to any great degree. But there was lots of fear and it was one of the scariest years in my life to think that in a couple of months my mother might not be alive. It was tough not knowing exactly what we were looking at. She kept her fear from us and she kept a lot of specific treatment from us because she didn’t want to worry us. But she did her best to explain the situation and let us know what to worry about to a certain degree. As I grew up, I realized that a lot of it was due to her strength and her ability to fight through. I will never know how bad it was since she wouldn’t talk about those days and the treatment. One testament to her strength was that even through all those treatments she didn’t let my brothers know how bad she suffered.
Losing her to cancer all these years later was one of the hardest things I’ve had to go through. I think at the end, she had just endured so much. She was so tired. I miss her terribly every single day.