Caring for Kerry...

The story about Kerry Magana came out this week in the Kansas City Hispanic News. Click the "Caring for Kerry" title to read the entire story as it appears in KCHN.

I ASK YOU PLEASE HELP ME GET THIS STORY OUT TO THE MEDIA. IF YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO MIGHT BE ABLE TO HELP PLEASE SEND THE ARTICLE OR BLOG TO THEM. I NEED THIS STORY TO BE SHARED. I NEED THOSE DECISION MAKERS IN HONDORUS TO KNOW THAT THERE ARE PEOPLE IN KANSAS CITY WHO CARE ABOUT THIS LITTLE GIRL. I NEED YOUR HELP SHARING THIS STORY.


Kerry Magaña is 15 years old and fighting for her life. She is battling leukemia. Her fight for life is taking its toll on her body and spirit leaving the once energetic teenager tired and wishing that her mother could be at her bedside as she faces her cancer treatments. Stress and anxiety rule Claudia Sabrera, Kerry’s mother. She struggles with the need to be in three places at once. As a single parent, she must be at work so that she can provide for the other two siblings in the family household. When she is not at work, she feels that she must be home with the other children. She can’t leave them alone. She has no family to help her care for them or Kerry. Sabrera has had to make hard choices lately. She has missed work to try to be at the hospital with Kerry. Now her work hours have been cutback. The family is in turmoil and struggling to make ends meet. Sabrera does not know where to turn. Kerry was diagnosed in 2006 with ALL Leukemia and was in critical need of a bone marrow transplant. Following treatment, Kerry’s leukemia went into remission. While trying to find a bone marrow donor, she had a relapse in December 2007 and the family faced a life or death situation. Her daughter battled the disease and it appeared that the treatment had worked. While she was in remission in February of this year, Kerry worked hard to educate the Latino community about the importance of Hispanics registering as bone marrow donors. She attended the three hour bone marrow drive held last February at Bales Baptist Church in the northeast area of the city. Her future looked bright when a bone marrow donor was identified, but before the transplant could take place, her cancer returned. She is currently recuperating from her latest bouts of treatment. She is scheduled for a transplant on August 11. The cancer is beginning to take its toll on the young teenager. She is tired and disheartened. Previously, the spirited teenager was a beacon of hope and high spirits, spending time in the hospital visiting other children in the cancer ward. She would talk to the parents and the children about losing their hair from the cancer treatments; she would introduce the children to members of the hospital staff and try to make both the parents and children at ease while they were going through their treatments just as she was. Michael Quijas met Kerry while his own 15-year-old daughter was in Children’s Mercy hospital diagnosed with leukemia. “We would stay weeks at a time at Children’s Mercy on the pediatric cancer floor. Kerry came into the room and she talked to my daughter. At the time Kerry had no hair and my daughter was beginning to lose her hair. She sat down, they talked, and she showed us what it was to wear a wig. … She helped my daughter out and her visits with us and with the other children and families was priceless.”
While at Children’s Mercy Hospital, Kerry has a social worker and a Child Life Specialist assigned to her. “Their job is to reduce the stress and anxiety that accompany the hospitalization and other aspects of health care here at the Hospital,” said Jessica Salazar, Manager of Media Relations at Children’s Mercy. “They will meet with the child and help them and guide them through what they are dealing with as a patient. They will prepare the child for medical experiences, they advocate for patient and family rights and they normalize the environment
for the patients.” Even though Sabrera knows that Kerry has hospital staff with her as she goes through her medical treatments, it tears at her heart knowing that she cannot be there to comfort her and reassure her that everything will be fine. “This is difficult for me and for her. She is preoccupied with getting ready for her operation and I am preoccupied with worrying that she is taking her pills. I know that her sickness makes her very tired to where she just wants to lay there and sleep and sleep. I want to be the person that is there to make sure that she takes her pill, make something for her to eat and give her food.” At the same time, she is aware of the needs of her other children. “It is something I cannot control. I cannot be guarding the kids for 24 hours. I can’t break myself into pieces to be everywhere. … I have not lost my faith but this is very hard, to get out of work, come home to cook and take care of the kids and then go to the
hospital it is difficult. … I want things to be stabilized.” As a parent, Quijas understands what Abrera is experiencing emotionally and knows how important the familial touch is. “Just to have
that family member there to rub her back when the child is getting sick, to administer the
medicine or to just make sure they are comfortable while they are battling this. I think that everyone wants a little bit of comfort whether you are an adult or a child, there is something about having someone there with you,” he said. “She wants to be there but she has two other mouths to feed and she has to keep a roof over their heads. I saw Claudia on one of the treatment days for Kerry at the hospital and she told me, ‘I need my mom’ I need someone to help me,” added Quijas. Sabrera has tried to bring her mother from Honduras to the United States. She has sent money to her mother, sent papers from the hospital proving the gravity of the situation. Sabrera has found the situation untenable. Her mother must apply for the visa in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, a distance of five to six hours. “She has to leave for a whole day to be there early in the morning for the visit. Then they turned her down without saying why.” Sabrera explained that her mother would have to apply again and pay the nonrefundable
application fee once again to get another hearing, which she fears will turn out the same. “She not only loses the money for the visa but also the travel cost because she lives so far away.”
Quijas has taken steps to see if he can get local and federal politicians involved in helping to bring the grandmother to the United States. He has contacted Congressman Emanuel Cleaver and Julie Myers, assistant secretary of Homeland Security for U.S. Immigration and Customs enforcement (ICE), to see if they can help expedite the paperwork for the grandmother. “Since I have been in this campaign to help them, I have been told that this is not an emergency to bring the grandmother here,” explained Quijas. From where he stands, he cannot imagine a more critical situation. “Until you are there with your child, and it is hard enough being in the room with your child, to think about your child being there by themselves going through this kind of sickness, it is really about making your child comfortable, which contributes to the well being of that person,” added Quijas. “This visa is a necessity. Someone needs to be at the hospital for that little girl while she gets her treatment.”