A Special Showing of Brotherly Love

When the four brothers walked into the second-floor hospital recreation room Wednesday afternoon, 10-year-old Jessy Turner’s eyes grew wide and her ponytailed friends’ mouths dropped open.

It was the Jacksons. You know, the Jackson Five, minus Michael.

To a generation that grew up listening to “A-B-C, Easy as 1-2-3,” the lack of the most famous brother would have been noticeable. But for Jessy Turner and her two roommates, all of whom suffer from cystic fibrosis, an incurable disease, the visit by Jackie, Tito, Jermaine and Randy Jackson to Childrens Hospital of Orange County in Orange was practically transcendent.

“The brothers and I, we brought you some gifts,” Jackie Jackson told Jessy as a roomful of patients and their parents and nurses looked on.

It left the normally ebullient Jessy speechless. Only an IV in her left arm gave any clue that Jessy is a very sick little girl. Otherwise, the Buena Park girl looked like any punk-crazed preteen, with her long brown hair in a ponytail and wearing a brightly colored T-shirt and black stretch pants.

“I think it’s neat,” Jessy said afterward of the Jackson brothers’ visit. “I was so surprised.”

One of her roommates, Sharon White, 9, giggled each time the Jacksons said anything, but she was solemn after they kissed her cheek and shook her hand just before getting into the elevator at the end of their visit.

“I’ll never wash this hand again,” Sharon swooned. “Or this cheek either.”

The Jackson brothers had arrived in their black stretch limousine to pay Jessy a surprise visit. Why? Because Jessy’s uncle, Lamar Mackins, had asked them.

“I wrote a letter to them and told them she wanted to see them very much, and here they are,” Mackins said. Actually, Jessy’s mother, Carole Turner, said Mackins wrote a lot of letters.

“She’s always wanted to meet them,” Turner explained. “We went to their Victory Tour in Kansas City. . . . And Lamar said he knew how to get in touch with them, so we didn’t give up.”

The Jacksons said they responded to the request because they wanted to give a little girl a special time.

‘It’s Very Touching’

“You just get the feeling that it’s very touching,” said Tito Jackson. “You can just feel a warmth from the kids. Some of us just take life so for granted. But you come here, and you really know what life is all about.”

Jackie Jackson said that five years ago, they visited another little girl who had been told she would not live much longer.

“But after our visit, she found out she would live 10 more years, and she said it was just because we came to see her,” he said. “If I can do that, I’d be the first one to come back down here.”

As the brothers looked on, Jessy opened several gift-wrapped boxes from the Jacksons that contained a stuffed white bear, a stuffed white pig, a stuffed striped gray cat and a doll. There was also a silver-framed picture of the four of them, and their record album, “2300 Jackson Street,” which they autographed.

As each gift was opened, Jessy looked more and more astounded. Her friends, many of them pushing their IV carts around with them, ooh-ed and ah-ed.

“She’s normally very lively, very talkative, so I know they made an impression,” her mother said. “She was blown away. She didn’t know what to say.”

Turner said the family moved from Kansas City to Buena Park a year ago, in large part so that Jessy could get better medical care at CHOC, where she has been a frequent patient because of complications of cystic fibrosis. “We had to meet the Jacksons so we figured we had to come to California,” she joked.

A fatal disease of the lungs and digestive system, cystic fibrosis is inherited, and victims rarely live past their 20s. It is a progressively degenerative disease that leaves a victim’s lungs with a mucus buildup and a chronic infection that eventually destroys them, doctors say.

Surgery Scheduled Today

The bond between Jessy, Sharon and Elizabeth Caup, 9, who also shares their room, is obvious. All suffer from the disease, and all of them have spent years in and out of hospitals.

Jessy is scheduled to have an operation today to insert a special device in her chest that can be hooked up to an IV, so she won’t have to have a needle in her arm, Turner said. Many cystic fibrosis patients have them because they frequently need IVs.

“She’s never afraid,” Carole Turner said of the operation. “She’s always brave.”

“I’ll have one like Sharon’s,” Jessy said.

Because cystic fibrosis patients spend so much time in the hospital, visits such as the Jacksons’ really make a difference, said hospital public relations director Maureen Williams.

“It is really a morale booster, especially to a terminally ill child,” Williams said. “Being ill as a child is very obviously traumatic, and their spirits, especially with cystic fibrosis, tend to get kind of low because they are chronically ill.”