Georgia teen dies after walking across the stage at her high school graduation. “I just want to graduate, I want to walk.”
18-year-old Sienna Stewart, a Hiram High School graduate, passed away just weeks after collapsing at her graduation ceremony on May 23.
Despite struggling with severe cardiomyopathy and a recent heart failure diagnosis, Stewart was able to walk across the stage to receive her diploma, a moment her family will forever cherish.
On the day of her graduation, Sienna suddenly collapsed losing consciousness. Paramedics arrived at no time, and once the teen regained consciousness, she tearfully insisted on completing her walk across the stage.
Sienna, who had received a heart transplant ten years ago, had lived with severe cardiomyopathy since the age of 4 and began “getting sick” earlier this year. Following her transplant, she had live a rather normal life for ten years, but it was recently that she had started “getting weak and slowing down.”
Sienna’s mom, Saevon Chum, revealed that her daughter would sometimes experience episodes where she collapsed, and one of those happened on her graduation.
At the moment Sienna falls, the high-school principal could be heard saying, “Just give us a second please, we have a student, just give us a second…”
“When I got there, the ambulance was already there,” the mom told Fox5Atlanta. “She had collapsed. She had had another episode. But this was the first time she collapsed unconscious.”
Once she had regained her consciousness, Sienna insisted on walking the stage instead of going to the hospital and begged her mom to let her do it. She was the last student to receive her diploma that day, and she received a standing ovation from her peers and those in attendance.
“All she could tell me is, ‘I just want to graduate, I want to walk.’ That’s all she wanted, because she already missed her prom, because before then she was in the hospital and missed her senior prom,” Saevon explained.
Unfortunately, a few weeks after reaching the milestone of graduating high-school, Sienna passed away. “As a mom, you feel so proud because she just fought through something that hurts her. You have to be proud. Till the end, I was proud,” Saevon said.
Her obituary read that Sienna planned to attend college and was on course to study sonogram tech in the fall.
We are so very sorry for this tragic loss. May she rest in peace.
