Judy Bratz has walked a difficult path in becoming a Hope Walk leader
By Jennifer Eisenbart
Staff writer
Judy Bratz’s journey with the Burlington Hope Walk began before the event was even a thought in someone’s head.
It was January of 1983 when Bratz and her daughter, Heather, made their first trip to Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin. A routine evening with her mother babysitting her daughter led to a trip to the family doctor in late 1982 – and Bratz received the news that her daughter was possibly blind.
The pediatrician referred Bratz to Children’s Hospital – now one of the four main beneficiaries of Hope Walk monies – where her daughter was eventually diagnosed as hydrocephalus – water on the brain because the right side of her brain had not formed.
“She should have had spina bifida,” Bratz adds today. “She had all the symptoms except the open spine.”
Heather would succumb, finally, to the weight of that and other birth defects on April 5, 1984 – right as her mother and father were facing the decision to place her in Central Colony, a now-defunct live-in facility for children.
“They didn’t have what they have today,” Bratz explains. “She was going to need 24-hour care.
“My belief is that she didn’t want us to have to make that decision,” Bratz adds.
Since 1984, Bratz has lost her husband to divorce – the fallout of changes and differences that showed up when Heather became ill – and her mother and father-in-law to cancer, her father to complications from diabetes and brother- and sister-in-law both to cancer.
It’s almost as if her life destined her to play a part in the Hope Walk – an annual fundraiser to raise awareness for life-limiting illness.
“But I also believed that what I had been through – what we have been through – has made me a stronger person, and a more caring person,” explains Bratz, who decided to share the details of her own personal story.
“I don’t fret the small stuff,” she adds, “because my (second) husband has always told me, ‘As long as we have our health, we’re good.’”
That others in her family haven’t enjoyed that good health has served as a motivating factor for Bratz. After her daughter’s death, her mother had the first of three occurrences of breast cancer – a period that would span 10 years and end with Bratz’s mother, Shirley Clarey, finally entering hospice in November of 1994.
“I remember going with her” to the doctor the last time, Bratz says. “She told him, ‘I’m done.’ She was very worried that we were going to be disappointed that she didn’t want any more treatments.”
Her mother died in December of that year, and Bratz believes that timing played a part. With diagnosis and treatment now so radically different, “she’d probably be alive today,” Bratz explains.
Her father-in-law, Bub Bratz, died in December of 1990 of prostate cancer, and her father, Louie, of complications from diabetes in December of 1996. It was a hard stretch for a woman who admits her favorite holiday is Christmas.
The losses weren’t over, though. In October of 2009, Bratz’s sister-in-law Joan found a spot on the back of her head. It turned out to be melanoma. After battling the disease for close to two years, she entered hospice and died in June of 2011.
Her brother-in-law Eugene received a bone marrow transplant 15 years ago at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Cancer Center. He survived until August of 2011 – two months after he was diagnosed with tongue cancer.
The many losses have taught Bratz to approach life with a certain attitude – one that led her first to join the First Banking Center Hope Walk team in 2000 and then join the Hope Walk committee in 2002. Now she is not only a committee member, but treasurer.
The journey has been memorable.
“It either makes you a strong person … or it makes you fall apart where you don’t recover from it,” says Bratz of the life lesson she began learning back in 1983 with her daughter in Children’s Hospital. Then, she was merely holding down a full-time job while juggling her time at the hospital with her daughter and her daughter’s special needs.
Since then, she has seen two family members through hospice, and found her own place. She is the family member that is looked to in a time of crisis – but she is also the committee member who can help the Hope Walk make strides out into the community.
One of those took her back to Children’s, where she had to do a presentation on the event.
“Before I walked in, I had to take a deep breath,” Bratz explains. Her first time back there, she met a family whose 2-year-old was going through dialysis. She was there to see new dialysis equipment moved into the building, and “my heart just went out to them.”
That is, among other reasons, why Bratz might be the perfect face for the 2012 Hope Walk.
The 2012 Hope Walk is scheduled to be a one-day event this year for the first time – Saturday, May 12, starting at 8 a.m., at Burlington High School track, 400 McCanna Parkway.
Funds go to programs that serve local residents, including Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin-Madison Oncology, the Aurora Visiting Nurse Association and Aurora Memorial Hospital of Burlington.
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