Some children don’t like school and stay home when they can. Other children don’t like to stay away, even if they’re sick. And then there’s Meaghan McCarthy, a five-year-old in Toronto.
As the school year comes to a close, Meaghan still hates to miss a day. For six months of her very first year in school, in junior kindergarten at Earl Haig Public School, she went to class even after her regular chemotherapy treatments. Sometimes, saving minutes, she left hospital with a tube dangling from a sticky patch on her chest.
Once, her mother, Johanna McCarthy, told her teacher, Matthew Bush, that she was starting a new treatment the next day and would have to miss a visit from a scientist. Meaghan showed up anyway, wearing a surgical mask to protect her against germs.
She went to school when she had no hair. She went when she needed a walker to get around. She went when she could no longer use the walker because she’d broken her tumour-weakened arm. The school board supplied an assistant, Stephanie Tam, who watched over her and carried her downstairs to music and upstairs to library and literacy classes. Ms. Tam could see her waiting outside the classroom door, impatient for class to begin.
Meaghan has hair now because the chemotherapy didn’t work on her rhabdomyosarcoma (a cancer that forms in soft tissue), the operations and the radiation didn’t work, and her parents, Dean and Johanna, are trying something else, an experimental protocol – a second one – overseen by the Hospital for Sick Children, which involves a weekly chemotherapy injection and a daily oral dose of anti-rejection drugs at home.
“It’s yellow,” she says of her hair, in a spirited, clear, high-pitched voice.
“It’s not yellow,” her father says.
“Yellow-ish,” she insists.
In September, Mr. Bush explained to the class about Meaghan having cancer. She was late starting because she had a broken leg. Her leg broke last July, says her father, because the radiation had made her left femur soft as Swiss cheese, and she fell. Mr. Bush told the class to be careful around her. In October, she shed her body cast and came to school for the first time.
She was always smiling. Always happy. Always curious and engaged in everything possible, whether in learning her letters, role-playing at the dramatic-play centre or in gym class, which she is now able to take some part in.
“She’s been an incredible teacher to us,” Mr. Bush says. “She has a real radiance. Her joy in coming to school means that when she’s here, she’s beaming. I think her classmates have some enhanced empathy because of what she’s taught them – all of them.”
Her classmates would take her backpack to the cupboard, and fetch it again at day’s end. “There were students who would just show up at her side and do whatever needed to be done,” Mr. Bush says. “Some kids have really put their best foot forward in including her into the fabric of the classroom. When she leaves, they say, ‘Bye, Meaghan, we love you.’”
Her cousin Joshua, who is 6, told her one day about Terry Fox and how he lost his leg and would take his artificial leg off when he went swimming.
“Why did he lose his leg?” she asked.
“Because he had cancer,” Joshua said. “Not the same kind of cancer you have. You’re not going to lose your leg.”
But her left leg will not grow again between the thigh and the knee, because of the radiation. It is shorter than the right leg. When she stands in her bare feet, one foot is on its toes. Even so, she likes to run, with her uneven gait.
Why does she love school?
