'Christmas in July' at UI Children's Hospital

IOWA CITY - None of the best Christmas stories mentions a heat wave, but Christmas came to University of Iowa Children's Hospital on Friday afternoon.

Filling the role, if not the large suit, of Santa Claus was 11-year-old Cameron Christiansen of Muscatine.

He delivered to the hospital 600 toys and other items donated mostly by schoolchildren in his hometown. There were Barbie dolls, “Star Wars” action figures, board games, a Nerf gun, coloring books, blankets, movies, a huge teddy bear and more.

So many toys, in fact, that Cameron's parents, Richard and Marci, had to remove the rear seat to fit the toy-filled boxes in their green minivan. The bear sat on the laps of Cameron and his brother, 7-year-old Conner, on the trip over from Muscatine.

It's become annual tradition for the family, although this was the first summertime delivery. Cameron first organized a toy drive for the hospital in December 2006. He knew the thousands of children seen at the hospital each year could use the toys, because he'd been a patient there.

Cameron was diagnosed at age 2 with Wilms' tumor, a cancer of the kidney that primarily affects children. At the time of his first toy drive, he had two tumors in his liver thought to be inoperable. In January 2007, he had half his liver removed in an 11-hour surgery. The next month he went through an intense round of chemotherapy and got a stem-cell transplant, using his own stem cells.

He initially had checkups every three months and has now graduated to six months, with no sign of the cancer returning. Five years is a magic number when it comes to cancer survival, and Cameron's parents are optimistic he'll hit that next spring. He just wrapped up elementary school and will move on to sixth grade and middle school this fall.

“We're very comfortable,” Marci Christiansen said. “We're getting more comfortable with normal life, not being at the hospital” so often.

Cameron knows too well that many other kids are spending a lot of time at the UI Children's Hospital. That's one of the reasons he started the toy drive.

“I just wanted to give toys back to make them feel better,” he said. “People would do that when I was in the hospital, and I thought I could do that too.”

There were more than 6,000 admissions and 166,300 outpatient visits at the Children's Hospital in 2010. The toys will be put in a storage area and be drawn from when needed to replace older items, said Kathy Whiteside, a child life specialist at the hospital. They'll also be used for birthday and chemotherapy parties, as incentives for things like taking medicine, and given by the hospital tutor as prizes.

“When kids are in the hospital, we want them to be treated like kids,” Whiteside said.

Family circumstances led to the Christiansens dropping off the toys in July this year instead of over the holidays. But Whiteside said they're usually lacking in donations in the summer, so the timing was good.

Cameron said it was fun to do something a little different, with a Christmas in July.

“We like being warm in the winter,” he said.

Ask Marci Christiansen what she thinks of her son starting the toy drive, and the tears in her eyes and emotion in her voice provide answer enough. But she puts it in words, too.

“He's just an awesome kid,” she said. “There's no other word to describe him other than he is just fantastic. They call him the rock star of the hospital, and I think he's pretty close to rock-star status.”