Vroom!
That’s the sound that emanated from a high-definition TV in a new playroom at Shands Children’s Hospital. To Frank Dinkins, playing a NASCAR video game symbolizes the race to fight pediatric cancer.
Frank received a heart transplant in November of 2009. He is one of the cancer patients who receive a new room at Shands Children’s Hospital’s pediatric oncology and hematology unit that opens today, Dr. Bill Slayton said Thursday.
The unit’s renovations, which is funded by a combined $500,000 donation from The V Foundation for Cancer Research and The NASCAR Foundation, will bring patients with compromised immune systems together and allow them to receive better care, said Slayton, the interim chief of the new unit.
The First and 15 Foundation, founded by former Gators quarterback Tim Tebow and two friends, Ryan Moseley and David Sinopoli, also donated $156,000 for the unit’s high-tech playroom.
The playroom allows patients, like Frank, to play a video game in the room while connected to sicker patients who aren’t able to leave their own rooms, Slayton said.
For Sinopoli, who had leukemia and severe aplastic anemia late 2001, he said the worst part about being in the hospital was the loneliness and the isolation.
“Online gaming is definitely an extraordinary thing,” he said.
When he was in the hospital, he said he “welcomed any diversion … Video games provided that diversion.”
The full impact of the playroom wouldn’t be seen until the unit opened today, said Sinopoli, who now works with Shands.
Tebow is expected to visit the facility before the Denver Broncos begin training camp at the end of the month, said Jennifer Russ, a Shands employee.
Another benefit of the playroom is that it gets patients moving, Anthony Tornese said.
Tornese received a bone marrow transplant at Shands Children’s Hospital in late 2003 when he was 13.
He said that one of the problems he had as a patient was that doctors worried water would get in his lungs when he wasn’t moving.
The new rooms, which have Nintendo Wiis installed in them, will encourage patients to be active. Patients who receive bone marrow transplants stay at the hospital, on average, for 30 days.
Shands Children’s Hospital needs the support of organizations like The NASCAR Foundation and The V Foundation, said Tim Goldfarb, Shands HealthCare CEO.
Nick Valvano, CEO of The V Foundation and brother to late college basketball coach Jimmy Valvano, said that people don’t realize how cancer affects families.
“If we don’t make this a personal battle, every person, every community, every doctor, then we’re not going to beat it,” he said.
