Ronald McDonald House : A Sanctuary for Parents of the Ill

Gail Singer remembers the time her 4-year-old son, Royce, needed emergency surgery for a congenital condition that causes him to stop breathing in his sleep and neither she nor her husband was at his bedside at Childrens Hospital of Orange County.

Royce has been a frequent patient at the hospital because of his sleep apnea and other breathing problems, and Singer and her husband generally take turns staying with him. But that day she had taken a break for a few hours.

“My mother had come down from Covina and told me I had to get away from there,” she said.

“I called back from my mother’s just to check on him, and they said, ‘Thank God you called. We have to do surgery, and we need you to authorize it.’ ”

Singer said it took her about 45 minutes to get back to the hospital, delaying the surgery. It took her weeks to get over the guilt.

Ground Broken

That kind of ordeal soon will be less likely in Orange County. On Friday, less than a block from Childrens Hospital, ground was broken for the county’s first Ronald McDonald House.

When it opens sometime near the end of the year, the house will be a place of respite for the parents of severely ill children--a home away from home where they can bring other family members, spend the night if necessary and carry on some semblance of family life.

Parents who need a short break from a child’s bedside will be able to use the house for a shower or a nap. Hospitalized children who are well enough will be able to spend time there.

Use of the house will be free if families can’t afford a nominal $5-a-day fee.

Parents of patients at Childrens Hospital sleep on cots in their children’s rooms and take naps on couches and in chairs, said Dr. Geni Bennetts, director of hematology and oncology at the hospital and president of the board of trustees of Orange County Ronald McDonald House. That puts parents under tremendous stress, she said, and they need a comfortable place to escape.

The 31-room, three-story Orange County Ronald McDonald House will be built at a cost of $1.6 million on a site that is now occupied by two small residences, which are to be demolished or moved, Bennetts said.

The project is being financed, she said, by donations from every sector of the community, including operators of McDonald’s restaurants and other local business people.

Marc Widdicombe, a McDonald’s franchise holder who is spearheading fund raising on the board of trustees, said $1.3 million already has been raised. In addition to the money, he said, everything from carpet to an entire architectural plan has been donated.

The Orange County facility will be the 105th Ronald McDonald House in the world. The first was built in 1974 in Pennsylvania. The corporation established a program to help hospitals and parents establish the houses, and franchise operators contribute heavily to the funding.

Parents of patients who are often hospitalized at Childrens Hospital of Orange County had nothing but praise Friday for the project.

“It will provide a place to go where we can all be together as a group,” said Pete Kaup, whose daughters, Elizabeth, 8, and Katie, 5, both have cystic fibrosis and whose hospitalizations sometimes last two weeks.

“When one of them gets sick, it means a lot of trips to the hospital, and the one who isn’t sick gets carted back and forth while I work,” Kaup said.

“The few times my wife has tried to spend the night, she has had to sleep on a cot in a room that has four sick children--and you don’t get much sleep like that.”

Gail Singer, whose youngest son, 18-month-old Cory, has the same disorder as her 4-year-old and spent two months in the hospital last fall, said the Ronald McDonald House also will allow parents of sick children to get together and talk with each other more easily.

“Sometimes nobody but us understands what we’re going through,” she said.