Toronto Star

PATIENTS ARE A VIRTUE

Toronto’s Sick Kids kicks off $1.3B rebuilding campaign with a heartwarmi­ng video starring the people who know the hospital best.

- VICTORIA GIBSON STAFF REPORTER

If 6-year-old Steven Spice is going to tell you why part of his skull was surgically removed, he’ll ask you first to guess his favourite colour. When you land on the right answer — blue — he’ll ask you to guess his brother’s.

So the process goes, prattling through the hue preference­s of everyone he knows, until the precocious tot is satisfied enough to talk shop. “Sick Kids actually saved my life,” he said, perched on a tall director-style chair in the early hours of a mid-September morning. “I would have died.” With that cleared up, he returned to trivia about colours.

That was the nature of the Hospital for Sick Children’s latest campaign video — the emotional black-andwhite video which was released this morning, to kick off a campaign to rebuild the aging hospital.

The heartwarmi­ng video shows Sick Kids patients and some actors scavenging in houses for building supplies, dismantlin­g a building and blanketing downtown Toronto streets as they rush to build the hospital a new facility.

The campaign goal is $1.3 billion, meant to address a wide swath of issues with the existing hospital. The neonatal intensive care unit, which tends to babies with high infection susceptibi­lity, is still a ward-style room designed in the ’80s. In the pediatric intensive care unit, low ceilings and a lack of space mean they can’t adapt to new technology.

While Sick Kids performs more than 50 per cent of bone marrow transplant­s in Canada, the unit’s air filtration system doesn’t currently have the state-of-the-art infection control technologi­es they want, and while patients face frequent diarrhea as a side effect of their medication, patient rooms there don’t have in- room washrooms.

Behind-the-scenes of the video shoot in September, patients, former patients and their families ebbed between medical jargon for near-death experience­s and simple, comforting conversati­on.

While Steven took a small break from filming — cheerfully annihilati­ng zombies on his mom’s phone — mom Crystal talked to the Star about her son’s diagnosis. Chiari malformati­on; it’s like a blister on his spine, she said.

Halfway through the conversati­on, another parent slipped into the tent. Jodi Baxter’s son Jack has grown up as a patient at Sick Kids, battling severe epilepsy. Dark days were scattered throughout his childhood — days where she was faced with what she believed to be final goodbyes with her son.

But every time, the now-14-year-old came back to her.

Crystal and Jodi shared knowing glances while comparing experience­s, getting their sons home and back to regular schooling. Both expressed unfathomab­le gratitude to the staff at Sick Kids for getting them there.

But while affection for the hospital ran deep, patients and their parents also didn’t scrub the unflatteri­ng details about Sick Kids out of their experience­s.

When Emma Neagu, 14, was first diagnosed with bone cancer in her leg and her lungs, she and her mom were bombarded with informatio­n they didn’t understand in quick succession.

“It’s going to be a long process, but you’re going to have this surgery called rotationpl­asty, they’re going to take your leg, and twist it,” Emma recalled. “And she started explaining — mom, you remember?”

Her mother, Claudia, nodded her head. She recalled asking the doctor to stop, saying that it was too much informatio­n. Both Emma and her mom acknowledg­ed that the medical team had only meant to assure the then 12-year-old that she had options for treatment.

For the months that followed, they say that the physicians at Sick Kids went above and beyond to make Emma feel comfortabl­e.

Emma, ever the teenager, giddily pulled up an old yearbook photo she’d found of one of her doctors. They went to the same high school, she said. Another photo showed the pair of them recently, beaming beside each other.

The photos in her phone show moments of difficulty, but also moments of triumph. She had elected to have the rotationpl­asty — where the top half of her leg was amputated, the bottom half was twisted and reattached so that her ankle formed a new knee — over a procedure that would have kept the cosmetic appearance of her leg.

That way, she could do anything she wanted.

And before dashing off for another scene, the 14-year-old happily displayed a photo of herself proving that true: with a waterproof prosthetic in place, doing a handstand on a paddle board.

 ?? RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR ?? Sick Kids patient-turned-actor Jayden Liuzza runs through downtown streets during a Sick Kids video shoot last month. The video is being released today to launch the hospital’s campaign to rebuild aging facilities.
RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR Sick Kids patient-turned-actor Jayden Liuzza runs through downtown streets during a Sick Kids video shoot last month. The video is being released today to launch the hospital’s campaign to rebuild aging facilities.
 ?? RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR ?? Sick Kids is launching a new campaign to rebuild the hospital. The heartwarmi­ng video shows patients and some actors scavenging for building supplies.
RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR Sick Kids is launching a new campaign to rebuild the hospital. The heartwarmi­ng video shows patients and some actors scavenging for building supplies.
 ?? RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR ?? Patient, now actor, Cole Heessels, 11, prepares for a scene on the Sick Kids’ campaign video set where the kids join together to help pull a dump truck.
RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR Patient, now actor, Cole Heessels, 11, prepares for a scene on the Sick Kids’ campaign video set where the kids join together to help pull a dump truck.
 ??  ?? “Sick Kids actually saved my life,” says Steven Spice, 6, who took part in the video shoot.
“Sick Kids actually saved my life,” says Steven Spice, 6, who took part in the video shoot.

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