Dan’s House of Hope offers an oasis for young adult cancer survivors and patients.
Dan’s House of Hope offers an oasis for young adult cancer survivors and patients
The problem with drawing broccoli, Allison Rosen says, is that sometimes it just looks like a tree. Especially when she’s the one drawing, she adds self-deprecatingly, as she draws a hungry face next to the broccoli, in an attempt to add context.
Rosen is one of 10 young adults seated at a long dinner table, playing a party game that mashes up Pictionary and Telephone, on a Thursday night in late September. Many of the people around the table feel like old friends, after having shared laughter, tears and all that lies between the two during nights like tonight. Some of the people are new to her. But they’re not strangers. Being a stranger is against the house rules here at Dan’s House of Hope, the Museum District oasis for young adult cancer survivors and patients.
A blend between a boarding house for young adults in town for cancer care and a community center for those who need an evening to breathe over board games, Dan’s House of Hope is the result of one family’s big dream to help others through what they found to be life’s greatest challenge.
Dawn and Roger Kenneavy’s 17-year-old son Dan was diagnosed with the rare bone cancer osteosarcoma in 2006, knocking the family to its knees.
“We were deer in the headlights,” Roger says one Friday afternoon in September, as he and Dawn sit in the downstairs living room of the house on Jackson Street. “We were in shock. Dan was 17 at the time, and it’s like 17-year-olds aren’t supposed to have cancer. That’s always somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody. But the fact is, there are twice as many 15- to 30-year-olds who get cancer every year, than under the age of 15.”
Shortly after the diagnosis, the Kenneavy family had to pick up its roots in Appleton, Wis., in search of top-notch medical treatment. First, they headed to the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. And when the doctors there ran out of options, the Kenneavys came to Houston.
The first visit lasted 11 days, during which the family stayed in a hotel. Then they came for a month, staying in a furnished apartment. Shortly after, they were back, this time for five months.
Before Dan’s diagnosis, Dawn had never used a single sick day in her teaching job. But soon, she’d burned through all her accumulated time and had to resign to travel to treatment with her son. That only added to the financial obstacles. But Roger had good insurance through his job with AT&T and flexibility to work remotely. So the Kenneavys emptied accounts and sold property.
You do what you have to do for your kid.
“That last year with Daniel, it was a desperate situation for us. So it was like: OK, we’re going to do this. We’re just going to charge forward,” Dawn says. “You figure out what you have to do and you just do it.”
This eventually led Dawn and Dan to head to the Philippines for a drug trial, while Roger stayed stateside to work.
Dan was happy to have his mom with him. But he still felt isolated. In high school, he’d been a lively kid in a big crowd of friends. Shortly before he was diagnosed, Dan had asked his parents to install a sound system in the family basement to create a cool hangout spot for his wide social circle.
Now he was spending nights in hotels and fast-furnished apartments; days in waiting rooms. It was a clinical social life. And it became isolating — for Dan and for Dawn.
“There were so many losses,” Dawn says. “It’s the loss of your life the way you knew it for everybody in your family. It’s the loss of the career you thought you were going to have for the young adult, and for others in the family going through it. And yet, you just pull up your boots and keep going. You don’t have the luxury of not doing it. You find a way. And that’s why if you can talk to others, it’s less isolating. Because they know a little bit that they’ve found out along the way, and they can share it with you and give you a thought or even just encouragement. And that’s what sustains you. It makes it less overwhelming.”
Finding those moments wasn’t easy though. A decade ago, young patients like Dan were treated by pediatricians, where hospital waiting rooms were full of children; or they found themselves treated in a place full of adult patients often decades older. It’s not exactly ideal for young adult patients who straddle those worlds.
“Dan came up with the idea for all of this,” Dawn says. “He said, ‘I love my mom helping me through this. I love my dad with all the support he’s giving us. But I need people my own age to talk with about this.’ ”
That idea crystallized in the Philippines. During the trial, Dan met three other patients: Young men about his age from Canada, Boston and Arkansas, all of whom were staying in the same hotel as Dan and Dawn. And on Friday nights, the doctors and nurses took the four of them out to experience the culture of the Philippines and help build camaraderie among the staff and patients.
“Community!” Roger yells in a “Eureka!” voice as Dawn recounts this epiphany.
Dawn still remembers the night Dan came home, brimming with excitement. “Mom,” he said. “This is what’s missing back home. When we get back to Houston, can we do something like that?”
They pulled out a pen and paper, and started making notes, which Dawn still has.
Imagine, Dan said, if there was a way to build a place that feels like a home during all that time you’re away from home.
“What’s it going to look like?” Dawn asked him.
“It can’t be a hotel. We’ve done that and it doesn’t work,” he told her. “It needs to be something like a house — a big house.”
They never got the chance to discuss what to name it.
Dan passed away in 2009 at 20 years old. And while the Kenneavys can now talk about that time without the tears beading over their eyelids, the words to express the grief that hits a family of five when its youngest member is ripped away still don’t come easily.
Actions come easier. And in the wake of Dan’s passing, Dawn and Roger refused to quit on his dream. They moved to Houston and began fundraising for Dan’s House of Hope, which they incorporated as a nonprofit in 2010.
By April 2014, they were able to move from a makeshift apartment setup to their current spot on Jackson Street, where they can accommodate a handful of patients and their caregivers at a time. Since opening, they’ve hosted patients and their loved ones from eight countries and 48 states for more than 3,000 nights and served up 6,000 dinners — all at no cost to the families, who can stay from five nights to two months at a time.
They host regular support group meetings and info sessions on everything from fertility treatments to financial issues. But look into Roger’s eyes as he watches a table full of 10 young adults — only one of whom is currently staying at the house — erupt into a roar of laughter over Allison Rosen’s attempt to draw broccoli, and you’ll see a soul-deep twinkle that says game nights are a favorite.
“I knew this was going to be mistaken for something else,” Rosen says at the end of the game on that Thursday night. Her original broccoli drawing was sent around the table. The player to her right had written down a guess of what Rosen drew; the player to that player’s right had drawn what that player guessed until the game made its way around the whole circle. “It was broccoli.”
There’s a loud, communal “Oh” from the table, as people stifle laughs.
“I actually thought about broccoli,” says Scott Taylor, who comes to these game nights often, as a supporter of his wife, Erin, who is a survivor and now a member of the board at Dan’s House. “But then I guessed a tree.”
He laughs, and it’s contagious, until even Roger and Dawn are red-faced, watching the action at the table in the center of their home.
This is what Dan had been hoping for when he’d asked for that sound system in his parents’ basement more than a decade ago. Just a simple place to hang out, where people come as they are and know they can talk about the hard stuff or just find distractions.
“This is what we want,” Dawn says. “It’s like, ‘Where are you going tonight?’ ‘Oh, I’m going to Dan’s house.’ ”