Health

Easing The Anxiety

Posted at May 28, 2008 11:57

By Rebecca French Smith

SHE’S A TOUGH young lady, working on her
Taekwondo brown belt. But at thirteen, Pascale
White has been through more than most. Looking
at her, you wouldn’t know it. She’s healthy and
happy and squabbles with her two sisters, but
once upon a time her fight with leukemia had
her all but out.

In 1994 at the age of one, Pascale was diagnosed
with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

A serious illness and multiple hospital stays led
Pascale’s parents, Sylvie Carpentier and Matthew
White, to establish Pascale’s Pals in 1995 to help
children who are suffering from serious illness
and their families. The nonprofit organization
supports the University of Missouri Children’s
Hospital at Columbia.

Because illnesses like Pascale’s strike so quickly,
Sylvie says, parents are not always able to deal
with everything that comes at them. Pascale’s Pals
offers assistance in many forms: phone cards (you
can’t use cell phones in hospitals), gas money, gift
baskets, Thanksgiving dinner, the Easter bunny,
and the list goes on. These are things forgotten in
the fog of worry for a child.

It’s the little things that make a huge difference,
says Cindy Brooks, manager of pediatric
services at University of Missouri Health Care.
Most adults understand that there are big bills to
pay, and extras are not always possible. But Sylvie
understands what it means to not have the right
Disney movie and what the right movie means to
a sick child, Cindy says.

The first time Pascale was in the hospital,
there were only two TVs on mobile carts shared
by all the families there, Sylvie says. Families were
fighting over them nonstop. That’s when Sylvie
took it upon herself to organize bake sales to help
fund the purchase of TVs for all the rooms in the
Children’s Hospital, the first unofficial action of
what would become Pascale’s Pals.

Since that first year and the twelve hundred
dollars they raised, donation totals have gone up
annually, according to Sylvie, who is also the president
of the organization. This year, the annual
auction brought in eighty-five thousand dollars—
an impressive amount, given that Pascale’s Pals
doesn’t advertise. It’s all word of mouth.

The organization will begin accepting donations
for the 2008 auction in January. Typical items
on the block include dinners at local restaurants,
gift certificates, and some more interesting donations,
such as the dinner with U.S. Congressman
Kenny Hulshof that was donated in 2007.

Over the years, the organization has donated
to the Children’s Hospital everything from DVD
movies to this year’s $25,000 donation to buy a
Luminetx VeinViewer, used to help nurses find a
vein on the first try.

The children don’t enjoy being poked, and
“The nurses never want to stick a child more than
one time, if at all possible,” Cindy says. “You just
don’t want to hurt kids. So if we can do something
to make things less scary, then that’s what
we want to do.”

For Pascale, it’s been a journey, Sylvie says.
Pascale experienced a relapse in 2000 that almost
took her life. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
at Memphis, Tennessee, stepped in and found the
perfect cocktail of medications for Pascale and put
her body into remission, which made an umbilical
cord stem cell transplant possible.

Today, Pascale is a thriving eighth-grader who
will be spending Christmas morning with her
family—at the hospital giving out presents.

Visit www.pascalespals.org for more
information.

December 2007

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