COMMUNITY:IT BEGAN AS a routine trip to the doctor for the Doherty family. Their two-year-old girl, Caitlin, had a cold that antibiotics weren't doing anything to shift and a particularly bad night prompted Karen Doherty to take her daughter to Westdoc, an out-of-hours GP service.
After that, events carried them forward more quickly than she could absorb: a visit to casualty in NUI Galway was arranged; blood samples were taken; a diagnosis of possible leukaemia was mentioned, and an emergency trip was made by ambulance to Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital in Crumlin. In a short space of time, everything that the Doherty family had taken for granted had changed. That was 2005.
Even now, what Karen Doherty recalls most vividly is the pictures she saw of children, who were in the middle of chemotherapy, smiling as they had their photographs taken with sports and television celebrities. It was her first impression of the hospital that, in the early stages of Caitlin’s treatment, would become the place at which all her emotional and physical energies were directed.
“When the time came for us to leave Crumlin and continue Caitlin’s treatment from home, I was in bits,” she says. “Caitlin was in treatment for two and a half years and, initially, I just wanted to be close to where the doctors and expertise was. But we learned.”
Later, when her daughter was thriving again, Doherty wanted to do something to acknowledge her gratitude. She thought about fundraising for the hospital but a staff member suggested that she think about what it was in the entire experience that had been of the most help to her.
She thought about the small, constant kindnesses of friends and neighbours that had sustained the family through their struggle: a lit fire when they returned on winter nights; meals prepared; someone to look after their younger child, then just a baby.
“So the idea was to set up a support for families in the west of Ireland who found themselves in situations like ours,” Doherty explains. Four years ago, she helped to set up the charity CD’s Helping Hands, which is now called Hand in Hand.
So far, it has assisted more than 50 families whose children are affected by cancer. From the beginning, the charity aimed to give families the benefit of professional help at home with menial but necessary chores such as cleaning, so they could concentrate on attending to their children at the hospital in Dublin.
It was only after Caitlin got sick that Karen began to consider the logistical pressures of travelling from the west to the capital for treatment. Sometimes she stayed with friends; at other times in hotels. Some appointments required day-long visits, but others took just minutes. The most difficult times were when Caitlin was scheduled to go to theatre. This meant she wasn’t allowed to eat and so sometimes the little girl sat in her safety seat in the back of the car crying for food. On the way home, her joints and muscles would ache after chemotherapy.
“Often, when we got to the house, she just wanted to sit on my knee. So having a fire lit meant a lot. When this happened to us, I felt very alone in the beginning and couldn’t imagine that any other family had gone through it. But, of course, they had.”
Hand in Hand wants other families in similar situations to know that they have somebody they can call on in their area.
“What we are trying to do in Hand in Hand is to let people know that they aren’t alone,” she says. “Because there is nothing more valuable than someone saying to you: I know what you are going through, I know it is hard but just hang in there and there is light at the end of the tunnel. What we try to do is to make sure that the disruption to the home is kept to a minimum. We got a lovely letter from a family whose child was in Crumlin for three and sometimes four days a week, saying the cleaning and laundry that was done during that time meant that they could have a ‘normal’ family day as well.”
Making sure the needs of other children are not forgotten is important too, she says. “Because the other critical point is that there are often siblings involved whose lives are affected in all kinds of ways. We want to try and make sure that their routine exists for them as well, so that they can get to football or to drama lessons. The level of guilt can be huge. One mum told me that her other kids thought that they had done something to cause the cancer. You don’t know what is going on in their heads.”
If a family calls Hand in Hand, a meeting is arranged to discuss what services would be of most benefit to the family. The organisation then finds companies that specialise in those services including professional childminders, caterers and cleaners. The idea is that where there are two parents in the family, at least one can continue to work.
“And we also hope that there will be days when everyone in the family just gets a day off and escapes from it all,” she says.
Funding is a constant challenge for Hand in Hand. They received a grant, which enabled them to establish an office, but all other funds have been raised through charitable initiatives. Since the recession hit, they have noticed a significant decrease in donations.
“We understand that,” Doherty says. “But we just really want this to keep going. And we want people to know that we are there for families in the west of Ireland.”
See handinhand.ie
