Let the wild rumpus start! Jack Yankee's Halloween in Sonoma

After a year fighting disease, Jack Yankee returns to Sonoma, ‘where someone loves him best of all’|

Jack Yankee runs around the backyard in his tiny blue jeans and dinosaur? T-shirt, his angelic blond hair catching the sun and his smile, oh that smile.

He is 2 years old, and for Halloween he’s going to be Max from the children’s book, “Where the Wild Things Are.”

Jack knows where the wild things are. Like Max, he’s been through a terrible rumpus. Last year at this time he was in the intensive care unit at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital where, at times, his prognosis wasn’t good.

“(Not once, but twice) they had the talk with us that he wasn’t going to make it,” says his mom, Madeline Yankee, her emotions still exhausted as she watches Jack with elation only a mother who has been through such an ordeal can understand.

Jack had, emphasis on the past tense, a very rare autoimmune disorder that made even a common cold life threatening for him. He was born with this challenge, and by the time he was 18 months old he needed a bone marrow transplant. There was no match for him on the international registry – and so friends launched Team Jack, a donor search that had 3,000 people, most of them in Sonoma Valley, swabbing their cheeks to give a DNA sample that hopefully would match Jack’s.

No potential donor shared with Jack the desired nine out of 10 genetic markers, so Jack’s dad, Alex Yankee, with seven of the markers, was his son’s hero donor. Jack was admitted to a hospital isolation room in early October last year. He was there for almost three months and Madeline rarely left his side. After enduring chemotherapy, a transplant and infinite tubes and needles, he was released on New Year’s Eve.

Holding Jack, Madeline rang the hospital’s success bell in the lobby and, as the family joyfully walked out the door, the hospital staff gathered round, cheering.

Jack had to remain in isolation when he returned home – and “clean” took on a whole new meaning at the Yankee home. Every time Madeline, Alex and Jack’s 11-year-old brother Zack entered the home they had to shower and change before they could get near Jack. Everything was constantly being sanitized – each item in a grocery bag had to be wiped down. Jack still had a feeding tube and multiple medications, and Madeline was both mom and nurse. “He slowly got better over months and months,” she said.

Finally last May his white blood cell count returned to normal and he was released from isolation. Madeline opened the back door to let Jack go out and play and he took off running – and he ran and ran and ran, laughing.

His happiness has never left him.

He plays games on his orange-covered iPad, loves “Goodnight, Gorilla” and still watches the movie “Frozen” over and over, just as he did in the hospital. He goes to “school” one day a week at a family friend’s home where he plays with three buddies. This week marks a year since his transplant and his recent round of medical tests resulted in all healthy scores.

When he first returned home Madeline brought Jack back to the hospital in San Francisco three times a week, then once a week, then every two weeks. Now they don’t have to go in for three months. “We feel like normal people again,” she said.

Madeline recently became a UCSF Ambassador, helping to raise funds and lend support to the hospital’s Child Life Services that take care of patients’ and families’ non-medical needs – and when you have a sick child, there are many. Hospital toys, a parent support room, music therapy, parking fees, a huge range of needs are met.

In a her speech at a fundraiser last month, Madeline said, “During the course of the transplant, Jack took a turn for the worse and spent 19 days in the ICU, incubated and medically paralyzed. We were in our darkest hours and in the very thick of it all Sonoma stepped up and provided us with a level of support I am eternally grateful for. I felt as if Sonoma had a heartbeat that I could feel pulsating all the way in the city.”

Valley friends tied blue ribbons of support around trees, light posts, mailboxes – everywhere – and sent photos of them to Madeline and Alex’s phones. They received hundreds and hundreds of cards. When they needed a highchair in the hospital, one arrived. A fundraiser dinner dance helped them meet extra expenses. Facebook words of support were constant.

“It’s not the norm to have the kind of support we had. We had family and friends, and then we had Sonoma.” In her work with the Ambassadors, she helps those without that kind of support makes it through at the hospital. “I just want to give back. They saved Jack’s life. They saved my life.”

Recently the Yankee family went to the San Francisco Zoo and there was a long line to feed a giraffe. When Jack reached the giraffe it licked his arm and he squealed with delight and hysterical laughter, and everyone was thrilled watching him. “Jack brings out joy in people,” Madeline said, “It happens all the time.”

Like Max in the famous book by Maurice Sendak, Jack said no to all the terrible roars and sailed back over a year, and in and out of weeks, into his very own room. Where his supper and Sonoma and all good things were waiting for him, always.

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