Video Connects Young Patients With Schoolmates

Math is hardly Christina Bowers’ favorite subject. At best, it ranks a distant second to the spelling tests the Huntington Beach fifth-grader often aces. But Christina was hardly complaining last week when recess ended and it was time to practice multiplication tables. In fact, she nearly cried with joy.

Diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer in November, Christina, 10, is struggling to stay alive. Since early December she has been confined to the third floor of the Children’s Hospital of Orange County, where she is undergoing a harsh course of aggressive chemotherapy that has taken her hair and left her too weak to rise from bed.

Far from worrying about homework or playing with her softball team, Christina spends most of each day asleep. Given her condition, few of her classmates from Maranatha Christian Academy in Santa Ana have been able to visit.

But last week, as her doctors continued to tend to Christina, another team from the hospital also worked with her. After a phone call to Maranatha’s principal, members of the hospital’s information technology staff paid a visit to her classroom, hoping to give Christina a taste of her old life.

Late last week, Christina woke up to find a flat-screen monitor next to her bed. A video camera sat on top, covered with a towel. With the push of a button, the screen lighted up and Christina was suddenly transported to her classroom. As she stared at the screen, she watched her friends work at their desks and her teacher, Veronica Watson, write on the blackboard.

Later, as the class filed in from the playground, Christina’s father pulled the towel off the video camera, bringing a similar screen in Watson’s classroom to life.

“Hey, it’s Christina!” a student yelped, her voice filling the hospital room through a microphone. A near-stampede followed, with students racing toward a monitor and camera assembled in their classroom by the hospital tech team.

“Can you see us, Christina?” one asked. “Can you hear us?”

Christina, unable to speak because of severe mouth sores caused by the chemotherapy, nodded and waved, her eyes glued to the screen.

The link-up was part of an unusual effort by Children’s Hospital, in the city of Orange, to help its seriously ill patients remain in closer contact with classmates and teachers during their often difficult and lengthy stays at the facility. Such connections, hospital officials and parents say, have been strong medicine, a chance for children to taste the normalcy of being in school and to forget, however briefly, that they are ill.

Officials at the hospital say they know of no other children’s hospitals in the country providing the real-time connection. Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles helps patients set up e-mail accounts and build websites to keep them in touch with friends and family members but does not offer video conferencing.

The idea came from Jay Engstrom, whose young son, John, was diagnosed with leukemia in 1998. Two years later, when the 12-year-old had to be admitted to the hospital for a bone-marrow transplant, Engstrom successfully lobbied Mark Headland, the hospital’s chief information officer, to install high-speed Internet wiring on John’s floor so he and his classmates could better communicate via e-mail.

Then, while shopping one day, Engstrom saw two-way video cameras that transmit over the Internet.

“I immediately thought, ‘Heck, let’s do it,’ ” he said. “I was only doing what any parent would do for their kid. I wanted John to have anything that would help him feel better.”

After hooking up a camera in his house and having John’s friends come over to chat with him, Engstrom realized that “the logical thing to do was to put a camera in his classroom.”

Headland and his staff agreed and started to coordinate with their counterparts at John’s school. The boy’s condition, however, worsened. He died before having a chance to virtually visit his classroom.

But Headland and others at the hospital saw how much it had meant to John to be able to communicate with friends and family.

Since John’s death in 2002, Christina and several other cancer patients have been connected to their classrooms. Some are healthy enough to participate in lessons, while for others, like Christina, it is simply a chance to talk with friends and watch as they go to the chalkboard to solve math problems.

“That’s her life. That’s normalcy. It’s what she’s craving: a normal routine,” said Christina’s mother, Celeste, as she watched the monitor. “Those are her buds, and now she can be a part of it.”

Hospital officials said the program also provides a valuable opportunity for teachers to introduce healthy students to cancer and other serious illnesses.

Since beginning the classroom connections, Headland has been raising funds for video equipment -- more than $150,000 so far -- and is hoping to expand the program dramatically. His staff has recently begun working with the Orange County Department of Education in an effort to make every school in the county capable of linking to the hospital’s room. Headland said he envisions a day when a patient will be connected to any classroom in the county within a day of arrival at the hospital.

That, of course, will take a considerable commitment from Headland’s staff. Headland, however, isn’t worried.

“We’re overburdened, but when one of these calls comes in, there isn’t anybody in this office who wouldn’t drop everything to make it happen,” he said. “We don’t get too many opportunities to work directly with the patients. It’s a blessing to be able to offer this.”