Kimmie doll helps kids understand cancer

I've made many breast cancer friends whose faces I've never seen and voices I've never heard. Our Internet connections are rich, despite our lack of verbal communication, because what we have in common -- doing battle with a treacherous disease -- is powerful enough to transcend traditional means of relating with one another.

Cindy Hurst is one of my breast cancer friends. Although she lives in Arizona and I live in Florida and chances are we will never look each other in the eye, we have a relationship cemented in the finer points of breast cancer: diagnosis, surgery, treatment, side effects, survival, and often the most popular of all cancer topics -- hair loss.

Cindy's hair came out after mine -- she's currently a bald beauty while my hair has been sprouting for three years -- and so I had the honor of advising her about the big fall-out. I offered her advice on when and how her hair might tumble from her scalp. We talked about options for covering up and ideas for preparing kids for a changed mommy. And now that my job is done, it's Cindy's turn to educate me about the latest and greatest methods of introducing children to the ravages of chemotherapy.

Cindy allowed her four-year-old daughter Ellie to cut her hair prior to watching it fall out all on its own. I allowed my four-year-old to do the same. But Joey didn't have a Kimmie Cares breast cancer doll. Ellie has one. And it's the very thing that helped her come to terms with what is happening to her mommy.

"The hair-cutting session helped," Cindy says in a CNN article, but not until Kimmie arrived did she notice a turning point for Ellie. "She finally understood," says my friend.

The Kimmie doll, the brainchild of Kim Goebel, who died of breast cancer nearly four years ago, comes with removable hair and a bandanna and resembles a typical cancer patient whose hair has been lost to chemotherapy. Now run by Goebel's sister, the Kimmie Cares project is going strong and is part of a growing trend to help children cope after learning Mommy or Daddy has cancer. What a gift.

Somewhere buried in the maze of cancer are all sorts of special gifts. I count Cindy as one of mine. Should you ever need Kimmie, you might count her as one of yours.