Caroline Martin loves the color yellow.
In her patient room at Akron Children’s hospital, she snuggles in a blanket with yellow patterns. She wears a tie-dyed T-shirt that says “Team Sweet Caroline,” and tucked around her are stuffed bears she brings to the hospital when she stays there for medical treatments. Her favorite bear is, of course, yellow.
Caroline is 10 years old, and she has been fighting osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer, since she received her diagnosis May 31.
Among Caroline’s colorful decorations — and a sign she drew and taped to the wall that reads “Cancer isn’t my boss!” — are four strands of colorful beads hanging from her IV poles. The beads are part of a program created by the nonprofit organization Beads of Courage Inc., founded in Arizona in 2003.
The hand-blown glass beads vary in size, shape and design, and each one represents a milestone in the health journey of Caroline and other young patients enrolled in the Beads of Courage program.
Over the last two decades, Beads of Courage has been implemented in 400 member hospitals in nine countries worldwide. The Showers Family Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Disorders at Akron Children’s is one of five Ohio hospitals that participate in the program.
A family’s medical journey
Caroline is finishing phase three of six chemotherapy sessions at Akron Children’s.
Sarah and James Martin, Caroline’s parents, brought her to the hospital in May with a tumor on her right femur. She began chemotherapy in June to reduce the tumor’s size. In September, the tumor and bone were removed, and the bone was replaced with a prosthetic.
“Now, we are trying to make sure it doesn’t spread anywhere else and making sure we kill every floating cancer cell that’s there,” Sarah said.
When asked, Caroline quickly flipped open her blanket to reveal the scar on her leg, which is healing nicely. “It’s big,” Caroline said, of the long red line that remains from her surgery, which required 50 surgical staples.
Her 9-year-old sister, Clementine, has a rare blood condition called Diamond-Blackfan anemia, which requires her to have blood transfusions every three weeks. She recently had her 200th transfusion and — not surprisingly — has her own Beads of Courage collection.
“It’s really cool because they do a lot of hard things, especially at this age,” their mother said. “At 10 years old, I feel like you shouldn’t have to face such big things, and it’s a way to give them some meaning behind it that relates to them.”
Bringing Beads of Courage to Akron
Renee Redenshek, a certified child life specialist at the hospital, understands that every medical milestone is important to the patients in her care — and to their families.
Integrating its mission of arts-in-medicine, Beads of Courage provides beads to patients enrolled in the program. Each unique bead represents a victory achieved by patients during their journey, and no victory is too small to be recognized and celebrated.
When Redenshek heard about the program, she and Gina Altieri, an Akron Children’s patient navigator, began looking for a donor to fund Beads of Courage for Akron’s young oncology and hematology patients.
That’s when they were introduced to Gary and Marilyn Diefendorff, who established The Marilyn R. Diefendorff Beads of Courage Fund for the oncology-hematology department in 2021.
As a child, Marilyn had received medical care at Akron Children’s, and she later became a licensed practical nurse and surgical technician, dedicating her life to caring for others.
“We have a bead that says ‘Marilyn Dream Big’,” Redenshek said. “The beads to begin the program actually showed up on the week that she passed away [in April 2021], so we always say she’s walking along with us when we’re pushing our little cart around and enrolling families into the program.”
Since Beads of Courage began at Akron Children’s, more than 250 oncology-hematology patients — from babies to young adults — have enrolled, collecting beads with every procedure.
‘They’re like warrior beads’
From having blood drawn, undergoing a bone marrow transplant, staying overnight at the hospital for the first time, to completing a round of chemotherapy, each procedure in a cancer patient’s journey is a monumental and notable step toward health.
“They are so proud to display them,” Redenshek said about the beads. “It’s sort of flipped the script from ‘I went through all of these really terrible scary things’ to ‘Look at how brave I was this whole time during treatment.’ It’s been a really helpful tool.”
For Caroline, these acts of courage are represented by two large beads in her collection — one shaped like a tiger from her first admission and another shaped like an octopus. She also received a dogbone-shaped bead after a visit from the hospital’s Doggie Brigade.
The fifth-grade student — who attends East Woods Intermediate School in Hudson — loves art and has beads that represent her accomplishments in expressive therapy, which provides holistic healing through the use of creative arts.
“They’re like warrior beads,” her mother said. “They love beads on this floor. They all talk about each other’s beads because everyone gets different ones. It’s a way to interact with other patients on the floor, which is really nice.”
The colors of the beads symbolize various medical procedures, and some of them have a “bumpy” texture to represent “bumps in the road.” For example, Redenshek said, patients going through chemo sometimes have mouth sores that make it painful to brush their teeth — but once they master that task again, there’s a bead to celebrate it.
Redenshek said the beads are a motivational incentive for patients and “a tangible way to show that journey.”
Like Caroline, many patients hang their beads from their IV poles and admire each others’ strands when they’re taking walks around the department. Some patients use their strands like a garland on their Christmas tree, and others have worn them in their high-school graduation photos to show how far they’ve come.
For the department’s youngest patients, parents often collect the beads so when their child has grown, they can see how brave they were as an infant.
Sometimes patients don’t survive their cancer battle. In those cases, the beads remind families of their loved one’s fight against the disease. One mother, Redenshek said, placed the colorful beads in a clear glass lamp to symbolize her late son’s courageous spirit.
How to help with Beads of Courage
Currently, the Beads of Courage program is only available in Akron Children’s oncology-hematology department. Redenshek would love to see it expand to other areas but would need more funding to do so.
Beads of Courage accepts bead and accessory donations only through its national headquarters. Here are some ways you can help:
- Glass artists can find information online on how to donate hand-made beads.
- Polymer clay beads are given to patients to commemorate their hospital discharge. To make and donate this kind of bead, kits and instructions are available online.
- People who sew are invited to register online and buy kits to make bead bags for patients. When the Martins bring their daughters to the hospital for treatments, the girls carry their beads in these drawstring fabric bags.
- Woodturners can make and donate bead bowls here. Locally, the Buckeye Woodturners create bowls for the program that have a bead embedded in the lid.