When Kari Bornhurst McHugh’s son Michael was getting his first dose of chemotherapy at Boston Children’s Hospital, his nurse, Stacey G., made him do his homework. At Dana Farber, nurse Katie bulked up on her knowledge of the Celtics in order to gossip with the teen about the team.

The two women were just a few of the nurses that McHugh praised in a first-person piece for Boston Globe Magazine, sharing how she would never forget the nurses who had found ways to lift her son’s spirits and bring him joy as he battled an aggressive pediatric cancer.


“An unfair number of their patients — from the tiny ones to the teenagers — will die,” McHugh said of the job pediatric oncology nurses face. “These nurses choose, again and again, to join the losing team. And they choose to love these children with abandon. So it was with Mike, from the day he became a cancer patient. The nurses recognized him for who he was: quick-witted, sarcastic, obsessed with sports.”

The nurses who cared for her son, diagnosed at the age of 12, treated him like a friend and shared details of their own lives as he fought to save his own, she said:

They made the scary feel normal and enabled a teenager — flush with self-awareness and thirsting for independence — to accept the port, the chest tubes, the G-tubes, the third-degree radiation burns, and the myriad other indignities that cancer forced upon him. They had standby tricks, like giving chocolate syrup (known as a chocolate chaser to the teens) after a gross medicine, but they also found ways to meet his unique needs. They created a skateboard trolley to push the drains from his chest tubes so he could walk on his own. They gathered in his room late at night to play a game we made up that had us running and laughing through the halls. And when he could not get up out of bed, Marissa turned on the music and brought a dance party to him.

When Michael died in August 2017, his family asked friends and loved ones to donate to the Nurses Fund in his name. McHugh said they’ve raised enough money to fund a yearly celebration for the nurses and two birthday gifts for each one that Michael himself loved — an Alexa Echo Dot and a gift card for B.Good.

“He would have wanted them to have the awesome fries,” she said. “That’s what you do for a friend.”

Read McHugh’s full piece in Globe Magazine.