It started as a perfect summer day. Jeff and Rheanna Deboer were preparing for a family camping trip. On a whim, they decided to make a rather large detour to Calgary, so their two-year-old son Brenden could see a doctor at the Alberta Children’s Hospital. Brenden had been vomiting daily for the past two months and after three trips to the emergency and countless medical appointments, they were no closer to understanding their son’s condition. They left Brenden’s older siblings Emily and Dustin with their grandparents and headed north to Calgary.
“We were really just going to the hospital to rule things out before our holiday,” recalls Rheanna. “We didn’t expect to come to Calgary and find a brain tumour. We expected to go back home that night, but Brenden went in for a CT scan and 20 minutes later we were meeting with the whole neurology team.”
Brenden was diagnosed with a rare brain cancer called ependymoma and scheduled for surgery the very next morning. There they were, alone and frightened in a strange city, miles away from home, eons away from their holiday plans and without so much as a change of clothes.
In another hospital room just down the hall, another family was facing a similar nightmare. Only two weeks earlier, their two-year-old daughter Ella had been diagnosed with a brain tumour – pilocytic astrocytoma. Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong for Ella – surgeries, feeding tubes, breathing problems, pneumonia, infections, fevers, facial paralysis, balance and coordination issues, vision and hearing loss.
The two families happened to share the same neurosurgeon Dr. Gallagher. “After checking in on Ella, Dr. Gallagher paused and came back into the room,” recalls Ella’s mother Christie Reimer. “She said, ‘I have a family that just came in and they’re going through something very similar to you.’”
Ella’s parents, Christie and Lyle Reimer, looked at each other and immediately started looking for the Deboers.
“We hadn’t left Ella’s side for a second for the past two weeks and now here we were searching the hospital for this couple we didn’t even know,” says Christie.
It wasn’t long before they found the Deboers and they became instant friends.
“They were so wonderful,” says Rheanna Deboer. “With everything they were going through, they took it upon themselves to reach out and find us. We expected to go home the next day, so we had nothing with us. Lyle brought us pajamas and clothes and shoes. They brought us supper.”
“We talk every day now,” says Christie. “It’s so nice having someone to relate to.”
Families like the Reimers and Deboers need strong support systems while navigating childhood cancer, but the forced isolation of the disease makes it difficult to maintain relationships. It can be difficult for friends and families to understand.
That’s where you come in. The Deboer and Reimer families can continue to build their friendship through free programs that your support makes possible — programs such as Family Camp, The Polar Express and Cooking and Caring.
