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Massaro: Boy who aimed to ride rodeo bulls leaves legacy as a tough little battler

By Gary Massaro, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published November 15, 2006 at midnight

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Ben Russ was a tough little guy who lived fast for someone who didn't have much time.

He suffered debilitating seizures the past few years, especially in summer and especially in the middle of the night.

Despite that, he wanted to be a rodeo bull rider.

"It's something his mom tried everything under the sun to stop," said his mother, Kim Russ.

The argument is over. Ben died Sept. 22, a month after his last seizure. He was 9.

Now, Kim is sifting through about $250,000 of medical bills she can't pay.

But she's getting help from her boss. She's a nurse for Dr. David Broadway, of Broadway Center for Plastic Surgery. And Broadway is donating all his surgical time Friday to raise funds to help pay medical bills. He has persuaded a couple other docs, an anesthesiologist, nurses and Surgery Center at Park Meadows to donate or waive fees.

Mentor Corp., a breast implant manufacturer, also is making a donation. Patients who agree are making donations to a medical fund instead of to the doctors.

"If there's any money left over after helping Kim, we'll give it to a hospice in Ben's name," Broadway said.

Kim has a 60-acre ranch east of Kiowa. In her spare time, she raises quarter horses. She used to teach riding classes but focused on teaching her kids - three others besides Ben - when she moved to Colorado in 2001.

She grew up in Hershey, Pa. After she got her nursing degree, she went back to school to get a degree in horse breeding and husbandry. She had a quarter horse farm.

She was moving to Colorado five years ago when Ben suffered his first seizure. Doctors never pinpointed the cause, she said.

Kim called her son Benjamin. Everyone else called him Ben. He knew how to ride bareback on his palomino. He knew how to clean out a stall.

"He did rodeo all summer. He went to camps," Kim said. "I still tried to give him the best life he could have."

On Aug. 24, his mom sent him to water the horses.

"He never came back in," she said.

So she went looking for him. She found him, unconscious, on the ground.

He made his last airlift to a hospital. He was in pediatric ICU for five weeks. Then he was in hospice. And then he was dead.

"He had a lot of energy and was a fighter," Kim said. "Everybody said he lived 18 years in nine."

Kim is also a hospice nurse who cares for the farmers and ranchers on the High Plains who don't want to come to Denver to die.

She said it's time to move on.

"I've put the ranch up for sale," she said. "It's a brand-new house. I haven't even been in it a year. My oldest son got married. My next one went off to college. My daughter lives in Kiowa with a church family. It's too hard for her on the ranch with just her and me."

When Gary Massaro listens, people talk. or 303-954-5271