Child cured at St. Jude grows up to work there and help others

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (KSNW) — KSN has partnered with St. Jude again in the fight against childhood cancer with the 8th Annual Wichita St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway. Our mission is to raise over $1,300,000 for the kids of St. Jude.

Bess, now a legal analyst and in estate administration at St. Jude, was cured of a rare cancer there as a child.

She would leave the hospital, cured of a cancer only nine other people in the world have had, only to return later in life to help others who are going through what she went through.

Bess’s journey is one that shows the effect St. Jude has on individuals and their families.

Here is a part of her story:

While on vacation as a preteen, Bess and her family realized something was wrong.

“My dad and I were kind of roughhousing as we were waiting for my mom to get ready to go out to dinner on our vacation, and he hit my hand, and my hand hit my clavicle, and I screamed in pain,” Bess said.

They stopped roughhousing to check her out, only to realize her collarbone was double the size of what it should be.

A doctor’s appointment was scheduled for when they got back home from vacation.

“As the vacation went on, both my shoulders started hurting,” said Bess.

At the doctor’s appointment, it was thought Bess may have broken her collarbone due to all the sports she participated in.

“I was in every sport imaginable,” Bess said. “My parents put me in junior golf when I was seven, and I was in softball and gymnastics and basketball.”

After seeing her family doctor, Bess was put in a back brace and received electrical massage therapy, hoping it would help, only to find it hurt her worse.

She would then go to see a bone specialist who did an MRI.

“I could barely even lay in the MRI machine because I was in that much pain,” said Bess.

The MRI would show that Bess’s clavicle had a shadow.

She was then sent to a doctor in Baltimore, 45 minutes south of where she grew up on the Pennsylvania/Maryland border.

“That’s when they did the biopsy and discovered I had a very rare kind of cancer,” Bess said.

At the age of 10, Bess was diagnosed with Myxoid Angioblastoma, or tumors inside blood vessels that are inside bone.

“The doctor at the hospital in Baltimore said that they wanted to cut out pieces of the bone that had my tumors in it, and at that time, [I had] three,” said Bess.

Her mom decided against it, wondering how Bess would be able to participate in sports after the proposed procedure.

It was the work of Bess’s mom who got her into St. Jude.

“My mom is now retired, but she was a hairdresser. And, of course, hairdressers like to talk,” Bess said. “One of the days that she was talking about my story, her client was the wife of a doctor. So, of course, she went home, and he heard my story, and he called on down here to St Jude, and they were like, ‘Get her down here ASAP.'”

Bess flew to St. Jude that same week.

Her family would never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food. She says it was a weight lifted off her parent’s shoulders.

Upon arriving at St. Jude, Bess says she remembers being very scared.

“I just remember meeting my favorite nurse and my doctor for the first time and my doctor looking at me being 11 now and him saying, ‘I don’t know if you’re gonna live or die, but we’re going to try to do everything possible to cure you,'” said Bess. “And so that’s what they did.”

Bess was at St. Jude from 1994 through 2001.

Bess in front of an elevator with Danny Thomas, the found of St. Jude and ALSAC, on it. (Courtesy: St. Jude)

Bess rubbing the nose of a Danny Thomas bust for good luck. (Courtesy: St. Jude)

“After I was cured in 2001, they keep you around for a couple more years to make sure everything’s good,” Bess said.

She would “graduate” in 2003.

While at St. Jude as a preteen, there were only two buildings.

“It just felt like a normal hospital at that time,” said Bess.

St. Jude started to expand, and has not stopped to this day.

“I saw it growing,” Bess said. “It started to become more kid-friendly with paintings on the walls. At one point, we got to … have our hands on the walls because they were in the middle of doing construction. So, I had my handprint on the wall with my name and date on it, which is really cool.”

Bess while at her time at St. Jude (Courtesy: St. Jude)

Now, along with her work as a legal analyst and in estate administration, Bess gives tours of what the St. Jude campus is today.

She says the growth of St. Jude means patients are getting treated.

“It means not even just St. Jude patients, it’s any childhood illness. There’s research here happening, and it’s going out freely to the world,” said Bess.

Her job at St. Jude also means she gets to work alongside those who treated her when she was a patient.

“I get to still hang out with my favorite nurse. Her and I have lunch together some days, and we get together and talk,” Bess said.

Bess also helps with research by participating in the St. Jude Life Study.

“They asked us to come back to do a test to see what us former patients are dealing with from the treatment,” Bess said. “They’re helping me as a former patient to show me what I’m dealing with now, with all the treatment, and then also changing, maybe, protocols for the kids that are going through treatment now.”

Bess says it’s great seeing everything St. Jude is doing.

By reserving a ticket for the St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway, you can help St. Jude’s mission of finding cures and saving children.

For more information on the 2023 St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway, click here.