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New Jersey family donates books to Graham Cancer Center

Courtesy of Christiana Care
The Tyler family stands with the books they helped get for the waiting rooms at the Graham Cancer Center.

For children who accompany their parents to treatment at the Helen F. Graham Cancer Center at Christiana Care Health System in Newark, there isn’t a lot to do.  
Waiting rooms at the Graham Cancer Center sometimes have drawing materials and toys that the nurses can take out for children to play with if they need to, but the options don't appeal to all children.

Some parents struggle to find a balance between work, raising their children and cancer treatment. Last-minute difficulties in finding a sitter or nowhere to leave their children forces many parents to bring their children with them to the hospital.

Cynthia Waddington, the clinical director of cancer programs at Christiana Care Health System’s Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute, said it’s often inevitable. Parents lead busy lives with careers and raising children, and cancer treatment is extra stress.

“Oftentimes when patients are coming in, they’re stressed, they might be getting results from a test or follow-up procedure. Children are stressed. They can feel the tension and the stress…” she said.

Last spring, New Jersey resident Audrey Tyler, 11, started accompanying her father, Randy, to treatment for Zollinger-Ellison syndrome, a rare form of cancer that started in Randy’s pancreas and spread to his liver. Though she understood she was there to support her father, she wondered why there seemed to be no reading materials for children in the waiting rooms.

“I probably would play on my dad’s phone, and that probably got boring after awhile,” Audrey said. “And I do like to read.”

She would sift through the Graham Cancer Center’s collection of books and magazines, but she said she could never find anything she was interested in.

At one of Randy’s appointments, he and his wife, Amy, walked by a room where they saw a basket filled with books. Amy told Audrey of the discovery later that night.

That’s when Audrey decided to take on a similar project for the community and her Girl Scout troop.

 

This past summer, the Tyler family worked to get the word out on social media: They were looking for children’s books for Christiana Care.

Donations starting pouring in. Everyone — from neighbors, to coworkers, to Audrey’s classmates and Girl Scout troop — seemed to support the effort.

 

“As the books came in day by day, my front step would have mystery boxes. We’d later open them and find out there were books there. My dining room was filled,” Amy said.  

 

They received almost 280 books, and divided them into 13 baskets — one for every waiting room in the Graham Cancer Center. Some of the titles in the baskets include “The Paperbag Princess” to “The Day That Crayons Quit”.

 

“It felt great that I got so many books,” Audrey said. “I’m surprised.”

 

The books won’t cure cancer. But they will cure boredom children and their families experience during stressful treatments.

“I was in just a few weeks ago to actually have a treatment, and I looked in the corner and I saw the basket and I was like ‘oh I remember that’. It put a smile on my face. It took away any kind of feeling of being treated for cancer,” Randy said.

 

Christiana Care says they are grateful for the donation. It will help create a better experience for all, Waddington said.

 

“To have that golden idea from a child who is also very affected by this experience, we were just so excited and delighted to have this opportunity to have something that can change the experience for our patients.”