DAVID MAMARIL HOROWITZ

david.horowitz@bgdailynews.com

As Andrea Brown underwent chemotherapy for breast cancer, small reminders of her humanity went a long way.

One, in particular, would stand out: t-shirts with zippers sewn on by students at Warren East High School.

Last year, an implantable port that delivered chemotherapy drugs through the breast would have Brown tug her collar down. Shirts for these, featuring collar zippers and costing more than standard tops, would only add to the expenses of stage-three cancer.

A nurse mentioned the possibility of sewing them, and Brown — a Warren East High School arts teacher — brought the idea to the school branch of the Family, Career and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA) nonprofit. In October 2023, students Avery Gidcumb, Taylor Mills and Jamie Phelps, with their teacher Jamisen Henley, took it on.

They eventually made 25 shirts — several for Brown, the rest for others.

“(The cancer) takes everything about your experience as a human and strips it down to the bare minimum: You can’t talk for long periods of time because you get winded. You can’t walk across a room because you don’t have the energy. You’re in pain just sitting still … You can’t do anything for yourself. You have memory loss,” Brown said. “As a woman with breast cancer, it takes everything from you that makes you feminine. It takes your hair, it takes your breast, it takes your body …

It numbs you to your own humanity … Something as small as this can help in ways that make you feel more human, make you feel better in a situation where there is no good.“

Curriculum from the nonprofit program Lead4Change helped guide the students. In May, it awarded them $7,500 to continue their work, which the students have called ChemoComfort; they were one of Lead4Change’s grantees selected nationwide last year, selected among more than 300 submissions.

And, announced last month by WCPS, Lead4Change is creating a miniature documentary to recognize their work. It’ll be the nonprofit’s premiere mini-doc on a grantee — the sole documentary for the previous school year — and Lead4Change Executive Director John Hamilton said he expects it to be completed by the year’s end.

“It’s an amazing story of students thinking of a problem to solve that doesn’t even immediately impact them,” Hamilton said. They’re not trying to better their lives — they’re trying to better the lives of people going through something tragic …. To see them give (…) a lot of their time and own resources to help people who are battling cancer is just really inspiring.”

Generic shirts and sweatshirts are donated from groups such as Fruit of the Loom; others are purchased with FCCLA funds. Following the idea’s conception in October 2023, the students would spend five to 10 hours a week at the Warren East culinary lab — measuring and cutting the shirts before sowing on the zippers.

The girls have modified around 40 shirts so far, and their work inspired Brown’s class to do around a dozen. The girls gave several to Brown and 25 to the oncology center at Med Center Health. Brown’s class donated their dozen. Lead4change picked others up to donate. And some are going to family friends.

With the grant, the girls plan on purchasing camera and video equipment to virtually teach others how to make their products, Henley said. Perhaps, she added, other schools can implement the community service project in their own classes.

They also hope to visit other schools as far as other states and teach how to make their products in person.

“We can make a change in our community because now, with this documentary being made, we have the opportunity to outreach to many other people and towns and cities and schools, everything,” Mills said.

The girls’ current goal is 500 shirts.

Asked what place ChemoComfort has in her life, Gidcumb said, “We get to do something as all of us girls, and we enjoy it, and then we get to make these shirts … We get to see people smile about it. We get to show awareness.”

Mills, whose grandmother had stage three breast cancer decades ago, recalled her grandmother’s happiness when she’d learned about their shirts.

“She was like, ‘I wish I would have had that when I went through cancer,’” Mills said. “And so, for me, that was a good feeling: to know this can benefit other people too.”

Phelps, meanwhile, is in her first year at Lindsey Wilson College, where she’s continued making ChemoComfort products.

“Continuing this journey outside of this little group has been a little bit of struggle, but it helps coming all together because I haven’t seen them in so long,” she said at a gathering last Tuesday. “So, it just gives me a little bit of a proud moment that I get to see them and work together with them.”

Added Brown, as she reflected on living with cancer, “It means a lot that I can help and that our students can help these people to even just feel a little more human, if it’s just for 10-15 minutes at a time.”