When Jessie Robideau was 12 and battling through grueling chemotherapy for a cancer she was not expected to survive, the child found solace in the gift shop of the North Dakota hospital.
There, she didn’t have to think about losing her hair, about the 20-hour-per-day bouts of chemo, about the uphill battle to just survive. There, she was just a young girl shopping with her mom, talking to the staff who knew her by name.
Now, 23 years later and bursting with life and energy, Jessie runs the gift shop at McKee, hoping to provide the same haven for patients and staff of the Loveland hospital. She and her team of 22 volunteers strive to make the shop — newly remodeled with its own proceeds — a calming and warm place where people can shop or just stop in for a visit, a smile or, sometimes, a needed hug.
That, she said, is why she comes to work every day. Well, that and the 22 wonderful “grandmas” she has gained since she started at the gift shop in 2013.
“She’s alive and made it and giving back,” said Janice Greeno, volunteer resources and spiritual care services senior manager for McKee and Banner Fort Collins Medical Centers.
“It truly is miraculous.”
Offering a new, natural look
Jessie, the manager of the gift shop, is the only paid employee. The rest of the staff, 22 total, are volunteers, who donate their time because they want to help out in the community. Each has a story of their own as to what brought them to the gift shop, and each is delighted to serve there.
They like to provide service, and quite often an open ear to patients, visitors and staff of the hospital.
“Sometimes they just need to unload,” said Jean Jones, who has been volunteering for 17 years. “It’s like a barber or a hairdresser.”
All of the proceeds from the gift shop combined with the profits from McKee Thrift Avenue in downtown Loveland, also run by volunteers, are invested in programs and needs at the hospital. Each year, that amounts to about $160,000 that is given back to the hospital, its programs and its patients, Greeno said.
In recent years, the volunteer-driven sales provided $210,000, which was matched by the McKee Foundation, to pay for new 3-D mammography technology, and just this month, $38,000 went to the remodel of the gift shop to provide a warmer more inviting look to match the spirit.
Another $56,256 went to three infant warmers for the Women and Infant Services Department, $11,720 to new flat screen televisions for patient rooms, and $12,428 to new furniture for the large ICU Waiting Room. A grant of $28,153 went toward cardiopulmonary gym renovations, which are currently in process.
Magnolia River Manufacturing in Fort Collins crafted wooden fixtures and wood panels for the walls, made with reclaimed hickory, walnut and Siberian elm. The new look brings the outdoors inside, the solace of a quiet, calm forest to the hospital store.
The fixtures were configured to give the gift shop almost double its former capacity for jewelry, wall art, clothing, stuffed animals and other gifts.
Plus new energy-efficient lighting in the gift shop, which reopened Thursday after being closed for several weeks for the remodel, will save the hospital about $1,000 per year.
“I love it,” Jan Hemberger, a 13-year volunteer, said of the remodel. “We doubled what we can do. It’s amazing.”
Coming full circle
Jessie was just 12 years old on March 16, 1995, when she was diagnosed with a severe form of Hodgkin lymphoma and given just two weeks to live. Tears come to her eyes still when she remembers the doctors telling her the only hope, though not a promising hope, was an experimental treatment.
For 20 hours a day, five days in a row, she received a grueling cocktail of chemotherapy. Then for three days, she received daily infusions before the cycle started over again.
The child was admitted to the hospital the day she was diagnosed to begin treatment immediately. The next day, March 17, 1995, after her first 20-hour treatment, she made her first trip to the gift shop.
“I bought a small tin of candy,” Jessie recalled. “To this day, I keep my pony tail hookers in that tin.”
She opens the tin every day to pull back her hair and wash her face and thinks back on her battle to live.
“Every day, morning and night, I think, ‘I have another day.'”
Jessie’s treatment lasted nine months, during which time she found solace walking in a breezeway and visiting the gift shop — and sometimes getting in trouble for riding her IV cart like a skateboard. Mostly, though, her respite from reality was the gift shop.
She was the oldest of 32 children undergoing cancer treatment in the same hospital that year. At the end, only she and one other child survived. She was one of the lucky two, and she spends each day living her life to the fullest, working to give back and sharing smiles.
She said she has found a home and a family within that gift shop, where she works alongside volunteers giving their time and themselves to help others in need at the hospital. She knows first-hand how much that service is needed.
Pamela Johnson: 970-699-5405, johnsonp@reporter-herald.com, Twitter: @RHPamelaJ
