Anna’s Pals secures property to build beach getaway for medically fragile kids
By Erika Tarantal
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BOURNE, Massachusetts (WCVB) — he Jerome family from West Roxbury has a special vision for the former Hoxie Elementary School site in Bourne.
Steps from the Cape Cod canal, just two miles from the beach, Kristina Jerome said they want to create safe vacation apartments for medically fragile kids.
“The families that we aim to serve don’t have an escape,” she said. “They need one.”
Jerome knows that all too well. She lost her beloved daughter Anna to an aggressive form of leukemia in 2014.
“She spent five months straight in the hospital. She was smiling 90% of that time,” Jerome said. “She always wanted to give back.”
We first profiled Anna’s Pals in 5 for Good in 2018. The charity, started in Anna’s memory, supports families with meals and supplies. When Anna was in the hospital her friends, her pals, would visit often.
After a bone marrow transplant, Anna became immunocompromised, and those visits had to be limited. A lonely experience, said Dr. Christin Duncan, an oncologist at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center and Anna’s transplant doctor.
“Our number one job is to cure people and to keep them safe as we do it. And so, the options for families and children, particularly adolescents, to interact with their peers, they’re tough,” Duncan said. “These are children who are isolated…for months at a time, sometimes years at a time.”
The goal of Anna’s Pals has long been to offer beach accommodations to families in that struggle. Anna’s father, Dan Jerome, said she loved the water.
“My parents would rent a house in South Yarmouth every year for a week,” he said. “That was her favorite week every year, just being able to hang out with their family, to go to the beach.”
“There’s one facility in the Midwest where immunocompromised kids can come stay for a couple hours and do homework and mingle,” Kristina Jerome said. “(There’s) nothing for the whole family to experience and escape. This would be the first of its kind.”
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