The Jimmy Fund Clinic

By Tara Daniels

Walking through the double doors of the Jimmy Fund Clinic, children are on the ground playing with toys, gawking at the fish tank. Teens sit and listen to music, some paint pottery and others make bracelets. Kids are just being kids.

“Bracelets were always my favorite thing to do while I was waiting for chemo,” Mack Spangenberg, freshman at Presbyterian College in South Carolina, said.

He was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia in December of 2008.

In 2007, about 10,400 children under 15 were diagnosed with cancer and about 1,545 of those children would die, according to http://www.cancer.gov/.

Spangenberg is one of many patients that have been positively affected by the Jimmy Fund Clinic, the pediatric oncology clinic at Dana Farber Cancer Institute. “That is the place where you feel secure when the world is so scary,” Spangenberg said.

Madison McKinley, a junior at Bedford High School in Bedford, New Hampshire, says that the Jimmy Fund Clinic has helped her embrace her status as a “cancer kid.”

“The Jimmy Fund Clinic is like my second family,” McKinley said.

She was diagnosed at age four with Anaplastic Large Cell Lymphoma, a cancer with no cure as of today. McKinley continues to thrive because of more than just the medical attention that the Jimmy Fund gave her.

When she was diagnosed at a hospital in Ohio, she was sent home to die. It was then that her family moved to New Hampshire, within driving distance from Boston’s Jimmy Fund. “The Jimmy Fund Clinic gave my family and I hope,” McKinley stated, “And they continue to do so.”

Jacquelyn Blanchard, 21, of Corinth, Maine was diagnosed with Osteosarcoma in 2001. “The Jimmy Fund is a place where you can get the best care possible,” Blanchard said.

She said she always stresses to those that ask about the clinic how nice everyone there is and how everyone knows your name and asks how you’re doing.

When Blanchard was admitted to Children’s Hospital Boston, she was under doctor’s orders not leave the hospital. The doctors from the Jimmy Fund Clinic knew how much she loved the Red Sox and when players came to visit the clinic, they brought Blanchard from the hospital and brought her over to meet the players.

“The care there goes beyond the medical care, they care for your emotional well-being as well,” Blanchard said.

Jennat Mustafa, senior at Doherty Memorial High School in Worcester, Massachusetts says words can’t describe how much fun she has had on the special trips that the Jimmy Fund organizes for its teen patients.

“I made such unbreakable bonds with other kids because of those trips,” Mustafa said.
After being diagnosed with Stage 4 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, careless mistakes were made at the first hospital Mustafa went to. It was then that she came to the Jimmy Fund Clinic and it is because of the it, she says, that she is alive today.

“The Jimmy Fund tries to address the impact cancer has on multiple levels of a child’s life,” Pediatric Psychologist, Robert Casey says.

He also said that the Jimmy Fund tries to focus on all aspects of a child’s life: their family, their school, their friends.

Kelli Pedroia, wife of Red Sox 2nd Baseman, Dustin Pedroia, said that the Jimmy Fund is life changing, amazing, one-of a kind, a life saver. “Every kid that walks through that door must feel a sense of hope knowing that other kids are experiencing the same things they are,” she says.




To visit the Jimmy Fund Clinic online: http://www.jimmyfund.org/