Kingsport day school to hold St. Jude Trike-A-Thon after two students impacted by cancer

KINGSPORT, Tenn. (WJHL) – “Your child has cancer” are some of the worst words a parent can hear. That fear became a reality for two sets of Kingsport parents.

But they say there is hope after you get the diagnosis, thanks to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Both Hunter Pendleton and Collins Turner attend Mountain View Methodist Day School.

A director at the school says when you experience what St. Jude does for children with cancer and their families, you want to support them in any way.

“When you have a personal encounter with someone that has cancer, a child, it’s very personal,” said Pre-School Director Sharon Ervin. “Having Hunter, he was our first patient, and we wanted to stick with it because we want to support St. Jude all we can.”

Hunter Pendleton is a healthy, happy five-year-old boy, but that wasn’t the case two years ago.

“We thought that he just had the stomach bug, said Hunter’s dad, Matthew. “Throughout the week it just continued to get worse. It wasn’t just’ Hey we’re sick to the stomach’ anymore. It was I’m lethargic, can’t move, starting to turn white, clearly there was something wrong with him.”

Within an hour of being at the emergency room, the doctor told his parents he had a softball-sized tumor on his kidney. It was a cancerous Wilms Tumor. The Pendletons were immediately flown to Memphis to go to St. Jude.

“When I think St. Jude, I think ‘hope.’ When you walk in the door, you feel hopeful,” said Pendleton. “Within a 48 hour period, our world just gets turned upside down. We also had a newborn baby, one-month-old, and we also at the time had a six-year-old son who we had to leave at home with our family.”

Everything was handled at St. Jude, from the healthcare down to the groceries. And the Pendleton family didn’t have to pay a penny.

“They do that so that your focus can be on your child and making sure that your child can go through the next day and go through the next treatment so that we can make them healthy again,” said Pendleton.

Elizabeth and Will Turner say that only having to focus on their daughter, Collins’, health has brought their family peace during one of the most difficult times.

“They pay our gas mileage. They give us money for food. They take care of everything,” said Collins’ mom, Elizabeth. “When she was diagnosed, we had a 12-week-old, so St. Jude let my mom come and stay with us. They paid for her too so we could stay together as a family.”

Their daughter was diagnosed with B-cell acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia after she had some unexplained ankle pain.

“She would kind of stumble a little bit and would complain about her ankle even though we never saw anything happen,” Turner said. “So then we took her, she had x-rays twice and then her health just kind of started to deteriorate around the end of October.”

They found the medical care at St. Jude to be top-notch.

“Within 24 hours of the initial preliminary diagnosis at Niswonger, we were sitting in Memphis, and within another 24 hours, we were sitting down with one of the most probably qualified medical professionals in children’s cancer in the world,” said Collins’ dad, Will. ” I remember him just giving us, instilling the confidence in us. He said basically, ‘If you follow the plan here, she’s going to not only be treatable, she’s going to be curable.'”

“I don’t remember one time when we had a nurse come in our room where we didn’t have a good experience, and I don’t know that you can say that every time you go to the hospital,” said Pendleton.

St. Jude is also a research hospital, so Collins is helping to find a cure just through her time spent at the hospital.

“We have been approached by several areas at St. Jude about research and we’ve said ‘Yes, 100%’ to everyone because we want to do what we can to help children behind her because of all the children that came before her,” said Elizabeth.

They all say that money donated to St. Jude goes directly to families just like them.

“If anyone can give any money, then St. Jude is the place, and I don’t think I fully understood that until we experienced it,” said Hunter’s mom, Andrea Pendleton. “Knowing what that money is going towards… it’s not just going to pay a fancy salary. It’s going to put groceries, food on the table for people, gas in their car.”

Elizabeth says the doctors and nurses know how to make a scary situation a little bit easier for their young patients to understand.

“They are trained to get on the children’s level and talk about these things where they can understand. So we do a lot of medical play and she really enjoys that. They started doing that when we were first at St. Jude, involving her in administering her medicines,” Turner said. “She loves it. She thinks it’s fun to help clean the little pieces and use the syringes. She does that at home too with her dolls and stuffed animals. It is hard for her to understand what’s happening but I think she understands that she feels better and is not as sick as she was.”

Hunter is in remission and flies back to St. Jude every three months for blood work and scans.

“They fly us there for the scans. Once we get there, we’ll get blood drawn, he’ll have a CT scan, he’ll have an X-ray, he’ll have an ultrasound and then they fly us back home all within 24 hours,” Matthew Pendleton said.

Collins is several months into her two-and-a-half-year treatment plan. She goes to Memphis every other month to meet with her care team. In the meantime, she undergoes treatment weekly at the St. Jude affiliate clinic at Niswonger Children’s Hospital in Johnson City.

The families are thankful Mountain View Day School is hosting a Trike-a-Thon to give back.

“Them taking the time to raise money and care about St. Jude- it’s phenomenal. They walked this with us. They’ve had two children go through in the last two years… they’ve had to go and they’ve had to leave school to be healed by an organization that their only thought is to have no child die in the dawn of life. What better organization is there to give to?” said Andrea Pendleton.

“Her teacher Ms. Melinda has come and visited frequently and brings her goodies from her class. We get pictures of her classmates. They all have Team Collins shirts and it’s so sweet and fun,” said Elizabeth Turner.

“As we think about the rest of our lives wanting to give back to St. Jude and how we can do that, there’s such a great opportunity right here at home,” said Will Turner.

Mountain View Methodist Day School’s St. Jude Trike-A-Thon is Thursday, April 18 from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m.

You can donate online or by calling the school at (423) 245-0515.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WJHL | Tri-Cities News & Weather.