Thirteen-year-old Kensey Dishman returned to Wayne County Middle School in rural Kentucky on Tuesday morning after battling COVID and required quarantine.
Her mother, Kim Gibson, had driven her there because they had an appointment with a counselor. Kensey still had occasional trouble breathing, but that was considered normal after COVID and her oxygen levels were good.
Kensey seemed fine when Kim dropped her off at the front, where she joined the crowd of classmates returning from a holiday weekend. The students were no longer required to wear masks, as the Wayne County School Board voted unanimously last Thursday to permanently lift a mandate tailored to the number of cases. The message was that similar easing has spread across the country: the danger of the pandemic is easing.
Kim parked and had just entered the school office when her cell phone rang. The school called to tell her that Kensey had passed out in a bathroom.
“Well, I’m here, I’m here,” Kim replied.
Kim rushed to the bathroom, where the school nurse had already responded.
“Her mother had come to her and she was sitting against the wall,” Kensey’s stepfather, Brett Gibson, later told The Daily Beast. “She was responsive then. It looked like she just fell and braced herself against the wall.”
Kensey then had a seizure, but came out again. She reported that she had severe pain in her side.
“She asked her mother for help,” Brett said later.
When EMTs arrived, Kensey began to lose consciousness.
“They couldn’t have her intubated,” Brett said later. “Her airway filled with blood, which is one reason they think she may have had a blood clot.”
Kim stayed with Kensey in the ambulance and in the hospital.
“She got to hold her,” Brett told The Daily Beast. “She was with her the whole time.”
Brett arrived as the doctors and nurses fought to save Kensey’s life. Their best efforts were not enough.
“They said, ‘There’s nothing else we could do,'” recalls Brett. “They couldn’t get her heart rate up. They couldn’t get her heartbeat. She had no brain activity.”
Brett is a reporter/photographer at the local newspaper his family owns. But The Clinton County News is a weekly newspaper and he reported Kensey’s death with a Facebook post. The Lexington Herald Ledger quoted his account in a story noting that the school had declined to comment.
Wayne County Coroner Gordon Hicks told The Daily Beast that the state coroner would have to do more tests in Louisville before he could give an official cause of death. Brett said he and Kim had been given every impression by the medical professionals that the death was COVID-related. And that raised the question of whether Kensey had been vaccinated.
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“She wasn’t,” Brett told The Daily Beast. “We wanted her to be vaccinated and we had… [vaccinated], but if you have a split household, you must have both parties. And we didn’t.”
Kim and Kensey’s father, Alan Dishman, was divorced more than a decade ago. Alan told The Daily Beast that several members of his family had had “health problems” as a result of the vaccine and that he had decided not to get it.
“Her mother and stepfather had the vaccine,” Alan said. “I chose not to.”
He said he let 13-year-old Kensey make her own decisions.
“She wouldn’t take it,” Alan said. “She was afraid of it. I wouldn’t force her. I asked her if she wanted to and she said, “No,” and she was just that way. She was very pro-choice about everything.”
He added: “There will be people who are going to say bad things no matter what you do. But, you know, I want it to be very clear that some view us as bad or the bad guys, but she believed it was everyone’s personal choice. †
That would have been fine if we weren’t in a pandemic that had killed nearly 1 million other Americans and if the vaccine hadn’t been universally accepted by all credible medical experts as safe and effective. Add to that the fact that Kensey was asthmatic and therefore particularly vulnerable.
Alan said he thought Kensey contracted COVID at school in early February.
“I believe she got it at school and she took it home and of course I got sick and then my wife and then the other kids,” he said.
They had typical symptoms.
“The sore throat and all,” he said. “It all went away a bit, but she still had trouble breathing. She had asthma and it didn’t help.”
He and Kensey’s mother had both taken her to the doctor.
“We’ve got several drugs here, you know, and nothing seemed to help,” he said.
Though they differed when it came to the vaccine, Alan and Kim both remember feeling they would be ready to resume classes when the week-long quarantine was over.
“She liked going to school,” Alan said.
First came the holiday weekend. They split it up and Kensey spent the Sunday with Alan. He sounded like the most loving father when he later spoke of an idyllic day with her on the farm where he lives with her stepmother, Michaela Dishman, and their four daughters.
“It was so beautiful out here; 65, sunshine,” he said. “It was just a perfect day here.”
Kensey hung out with her siblings and a collection of animals, beyond the usual cows and chickens and rabbits.
“She’s got a hermit crab here,” Alan reported. She called it ‘My Grandcrab’. She put this hermit crab in front of the TV and said, ‘I’m going to put it in the front row.’”
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At the end of the day, everyone went to a Japanese restaurant that was one of her favorites.
“She loved Japanese cuisine,” Alan said. “She had a big plate of rice.”
Then they went to a multiplex movie theater. Kensey and her oldest sister asked if they could only see ‘Death on the Nile’.
“They wanted to watch a movie together,” Alan said. “It made them feel like big girls.”
Kensey then spent Monday with Kim and Brett. The couple had contracted COVID in October 2020, before vaccine was even a choice. Kim recovered quickly, but Brett had had a harder time, having had a yeast infection of the lungs years earlier. He also developed heart complications and had to undergo major surgery.
They didn’t have to be persuaded to take the photo when it was available.
“We got vaccines as soon as we were allowed to and we got our boosters,” Brett said.
About 60 percent of Clinton County, where Brett lives, and adjacent Wayne County, where Alan has a farm, has not been vaccinated.
“People I think are afraid of it,” Brett said. “And there are a lot of people in this area, they kind of think that” [if] the government tells you to do it, then we won’t.”
His family newspaper has tried to encourage vaccination by publishing a photo every week of a company where everyone has received the shot.
“It’s hard to find companies that are fully vaccinated,” Brett said. “Often the ones I’ve found that are fully vaccinated are like the barbershop where only one person works.”
Brett only wished Kensey had been vaccinated when he took a family photo of her after a major storm on January 17.
“She really wanted to do a photo shoot in the snow,” Brett recalls.
He didn’t have his camera with him, but he had to make do with his cell phone. She posed against the immaculate white background, a teenager who was outgoing and shy, a social butterfly and a homebody.
On Friday, her school said she still had no explanation other than a word to describe an all-encompassing feeling.
“Sadness,” said a spokesman.
The coroner said there was still no official cause of death, but the body had been released Friday morning. The photo of her in the snow remains a benchmark for all that was lost.
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