Sandy Springs: Believing in hope after cancer

Ginger Kindred knows.

This week Ginger and husband Greg, as well as a legion of others who also know, hosted Christmas dinner for more than 100 pediatric cancer patients and their families at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Scottish Rite (CHOA). These are folks going through the badlands of cancer — a place the Kindreds know quite well.

It was March 18, 2005. Their son Trenton, barely a year old, had a golf ball-sized lump under his left arm. They waited for answers in the emergency room at CHOA. Doctors advised calm. It could be this, it could be that.

I’ve been in the ER with a sick child. At a certain point fatigue abrades patience. Just tell me what’s wrong and give me a prescription so we can all go home. Ginger and Greg just wanted an answer.

But it wasn’t this, it wasn’t that. It was a Stage IV neuroblastoma. Ginger collapsed to the cold linoleum floor. Their beautiful little boy had cancer. How could that happen? What was next? Is there a cure? They didn’t know.

Ginger quit her job because a leave wouldn’t be enough. Trenton was in the hospital for eight months. There was surgery, chemo, stem cell harvesting and marrow transplants. The Kindreds, like the parents of other pediatric cancer patients, got to know the halls of CHOA too well. Their world was each other, older son Taylor and Trenton.

A few weeks into treatment Kristin Connor stopped in. Now executive director of CURE Childhood Cancer, she was there because years before she had been in the Kindreds’ world. Her words carried depth and weight. She had walked the halls of the cancer ward. She could tell you what effect this treatment would have. She knew.

In time other people came forward. Some of their stories had happy endings, some didn’t. But like Kristin, because they had been in the badlands, they make it their business to be there for other families.

This story has a happy ending. Trenton is cancer-free. He started school, plays football and loves his big brother. This week, they joined their parents in serving up that homemade Christmas dinner. Families with a child in treatment for cancer don’t always have time to make big holiday dinners. For them navigating from sunup to sundown is a major accomplishment.

Because she’s been through it and knows, Ginger is now among those who visit parents where she was in 2005. They sit with those still reeling from hearing their child has cancer. They listen to their fears; they hold them when they cry and when they have no tears left they cry for them.

This morning in the Kindred home there are two rowdy boys laughing and shrieking and bumping and thumping. No doctors, no nurses, nary a needle to be found. And Ginger would like everyone to know this — while pediatric cancer is a calamitous disease, there is hope.

And I believe her. She knows.