It was the wording in text messages that had Frankfort resident and mom Shannon Delgado thinking that something was off with her ex-husband, Raymond Brown. “I was chalking it up to spell-check or talk-to-texts doing something wrong, because it was like one or two words that didn’t make sense, but I could still see what he was trying to say,” Delgado said. “It would be like: ‘Do you need me to pick the kids up for their situations?’ Not ‘Do you need me to pick Henry up from football?’ It was a strange way of putting things.
” Delgado, who has four children with Brown, thought perhaps Brown had had a stroke. The couple had married in 2007, separated in 2017 and divorced in 2019. She kept telling Brown that something was wrong and he should get checked at the hospital.
Delgado reached out to Brown’s siblings in hopes that they could coax him to seek medical help. Three days later, Brown’s brother took him to an emergency room where a CT scan found a mass about the size of a walnut in the left frontal lobe of his brain. His diagnosis in September 2023: Grade 4 glioblastoma.
Brown had brain surgery followed by radiation treatment. But Delgado, a lifelong educator now teaching at the College of DuPage, said the surgery could remove only about 80% of the tumor, and the 20% that remains is still growing given the aggressiveness of the cancer. “He’s getting more deficits.
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The doctors are telling me more deficits are a sign the cancer is spreading,” she s.