Dana Point-based charity helps young patients feel like kids again
By CLARA BEARD
When Dana Point resident Taylor Carol was just 11 years old, he was diagnosed with cancer.
There were long hospital stays, medications and procedures. At one point, he spent about six months in an isolation unit, where visitors were limited to doctors and nurses in protective gear. Taylor was separated from his friends, school and little brother. During the worst of it, he lost the ability to walk, speak, eat and see.
His father, Jim Carol, remembers what doctors told the family during that time: Taylor might not survive.
“I made a promise,” Jim said. “If he lived, I would use my life to help other kids.”
Click on photo for a larger image
Photos courtesy of GameChanger Charity
Jim Carol and his son Taylor attend a baseball game
That promise became GameChanger Charity, a local nonprofit Jim and Taylor now run together. What began in 2007 as a drive to collect video games for children’s hospitals has grown into a bigger effort to make hospital life easier for young patients and their families.
GameChanger delivers new toys and games, gaming equipment, LEGO sets, hospital game rooms and family rooms, scholarships and technology designed to help children cope with treatment. The charity says it has helped more than 25,000 children in 250 hospitals on five continents, providing more than $39 million in cash and donated goods.
But the plan didn’t start this way. Jim had retired from the technology company he co-founded and initially thought he could help by getting games into hospital rooms. It soon became clear that hospitals could not accept used donations and that the need went far beyond entertainment.
“We learned fast that hospitals can only take new, sealed items,” Jim said. “Since then, we’ve adapted almost every year to what kids and hospital Child Life teams tell us they need.”
Those needs have changed. Video games remain important, but so do simple things that can hold a child’s attention on a hard day. Jim said LEGO sets are now in particularly high demand, and GameChanger sends them by the pallet to children’s hospitals across Southern California.
The point is not simply to fill time. A child in a hospital gown may feel as if every part of life has been reduced to a diagnosis. And Taylor knows that feeling all too well.
“When you’re a patient in a gown in a hospital room, so much of your identity gets stripped away,” he said. “A video game, a LEGO set or a Minecraft server where you can play with other sick kids gives some of that back.”
In the hospital, Taylor said, games gave him a way to connect with his brother and feel something resembling normal. His father still remembers seeing the two boys laugh together while playing.
Click on photo for a larger image
Taylor Carol plays video games with friends as a child
“It lets you express yourself, connect with people and forget the pain for a while,” Taylor said.
Jim’s years beside his son’s hospital bed also changed how he saw the families around them. The medical care may focus on the child, he said, but the situation lands on everyone in the household. A parent may be trying to keep a job while staying at the hospital. Brothers and sisters may be at home. The bills don’t stop coming.
“A child’s illness affects everybody: parents, siblings, caregivers,” Jim said. “The medicine comes first. But the fear, boredom and isolation that kids in the hospital face are real too.”
GameChanger has continued to build on its gaming roots, including safe, closed gaming systems and research with Yale University using wearable and virtual-reality technology that may help reduce stress for young patients. Yet Taylor said the heart of the work stays simple: bringing pieces of childhood into a place where children can lose so much of it.
“Some of that is cutting-edge,” he said. “But an important part will always be the LEGO sets and video games you can play with your brother or your friends, the way you would at home.”
The work has especially personal meaning for Taylor. He survived, but many of the children he came to know in the hospital did not. Returning to ordinary life came with health challenges, grief and survivor’s guilt.
“For years, I struggled to understand why I lived when they didn’t,” Taylor said. “GameChanger has helped me turn that pain into love.”
The charity is planning Hope Ranch, a retreat in Orange County for young survivors and caregivers, as part of its next chapter. Jim said support cannot stop once a child leaves the hospital, and Taylor agrees.
“Every child we reach is a way to honor the friends I lost and to make sure no kid feels as alone as I did,” he said.
More information about GameChanger Charity can be found at www.gamechangercharity.org.
