Candy Cane Express rides on
Paramedics join forces to give sick children a holly jolly yuletide
For a few hours they were normal kids again, snacking on sugar cookies, singing carols, gazing excitedly at brightly decorated houses. For those few hours at least, they were able to leave the Stollery Children’s Hospital, if not their beds, and bask in the joy of the Christmas season.
It has been this way in Edmonton for 30 years, with kind-hearted paramedics quietly carrying out the same tradition.
They carefully lift patients in their beds aboard a bus, and then prop them up so they can see the lights of Candy Cane Lane out the window.
“For me, this is what Christmas is all about,” Mark Carson, a paramedic who has played Santa to sick children for 29 years, says.
“For some of these kids, it may be the only time they are out of the hospital this holiday season.
“It’s not Christmas for me until I see a smile on their faces.”
Donning red Santa hats and antlers and even elf costumes, paramedics prepare the vehicle for the children, hanging plastic icicles from the ceiling, stringing garlands, placing lights above the windows. All the work is done voluntarily, all of the time donated.
“This is really near and dear to my heart,” Matthew Lockert, 29, says. “When I get an opportunity to give back to the Stollery, I try to give back as much as I can.”
As a child, Lockert was hospitalized one Christmas and taken by bus for a tour of Candy Cane Lane, the neighbourhood in Edmonton where one house after another is gaily decorated. When he became an emergency medical technician eight years ago, Lockert asked to be included in the operation, which carries the moniker of the Candy Cane Express.
“It is an absolute blast,” Lockert, dressed in a jolly Santa hat, says. “For a brief moment, the kids forget they are in the hospital.”
An EMS supervisor with Alberta Health Services, Karen Mann has dressed like an elf and ridden aboard the Candy Cane Express for five years.
“It wouldn’t feel like Christmas if I wasn’t doing this,” Mann says. “It’s something I really look forward to.”
With Santa and Mrs. Claus walking the aisles, and a paramedic dressed as Frosty joining in carols, the bus pulled out of an ambulance bay beside the hospital early one evening this week.
For 13-year-old Lincoln Grayson of Beaumont, it was the first trip outside the Stollery since he suffered a spinal fracture tumbling off his bicycle on July 4.
For 7-year-old cardiac patient Reid Skogen of Calgary, it was only the second outing in 3 1/2 months. A secondgrade student, Reid has had surgery twice and suffered a stroke since being diagnosed with a heart inflammation called myocarditis.
Sitting up in his bed on the bus with an artificial heart in a backpack behind him, Reid happily tried on a Captain America mask given to him by Santa.
Nurses at the Stollery ask patients to write letters to Santa and then turn them over to paramedics who volunteer to go shopping.
“With everything you went through, you’re my hero,” Carson, dressed as Kriss Kringle, says, watching Reid play with the action figure.
A 3 1/2-year-old ball of energy, Trystan Wade of Edmonton sat on his bed near the back in yellow-striped pyjamas, showing only minor effects of a bacterial infection in one of his lymph nodes.
Playing with a SpiderMan figure, he shouted as he peered out the window at Christmas decorations, giggled as he played peek-aboo, and sang along to Jingle Bells, Rudolph and a handful of other carols.
Outside, the word JOY was illuminated in a home’s living-room window.
“It is absolutely amazing,” his mother, Shalys Wade, says. “It is wonderful to be able to take him to do this.” mklinkenberg@edmontonjournal.com