Through child’s cancer journey, Freedlunds still ‘find joy’

BOURBONNAIS – Cooper Freedlund is not the type to seek the spotlight, so when he was asked to ring the cancer-free bell in front of nearly 100 people, his dad offered him a little incentive.

Gary Freedlund had an idea what might motivate his 13-year-old son to make some noise during his end-of-chemo party last weekend. He would give his son $1 per bell ring.

“Cooper was very hesitant to ring the bell up at the hospital,” Gary recalled.

While Cooper doesn’t care much for attention, it was important to his parents, Gary and Jamie, of Bourbonnais, that the community who supported the family through their journey got to be part of the moment of celebration.

They also wanted to acknowledge Cooper’s courage.

“The hospital calls it the ‘bravery bell,’” Jamie added. “Because it doesn’t always mean you’re totally done [with cancer], but it’s marking that you were brave.”

So, with a little push from Dad and the presence of his friends, Cooper felt comfortable enough to ring the bell loud and proud.

“I was willing to pay whatever the cost was to hear him, with full enthusiasm, ring that bell,” Gary said.

Diagnosis, treatment

Cooper was diagnosed last fall with osteosarcoma, a rare type of bone cancer which most commonly afflicts teenagers and young adults, often during growth spurts.

He had gone to the doctor to get a painful lump in his arm checked out, which his family assumed was a basketball injury, before the tumor was discovered.

He started with two cycles of chemotherapy, each involving three weeks of inpatient treatment out of a five-week period. Then, he had surgery to remove the diseased bone from his arm and replace it with a healthy piece of bone from his leg.

After surgery, he went through four more cycles of chemotherapy, lasting 18 weeks in total.

Now, Cooper said he is feeling good. His recent scans returned clean results.

He is slated to have one more surgery in a few weeks to remove the metal plate that was inserted to keep his wrist in place while his arm healed.

Some individuals with this type of cancer can lose a limb, so the family is grateful Cooper’s treatments worked well.

Soon, Cooper will be starting his eighth grade year at Bourbonnais Upper Grade Center as a normal, healthy teenager who loves basketball and playing video games with his friends and wants to study engineering in the future.

Mattea’s Joy

While the fight against cancer was arduous for Cooper, his parents also embarked on a difficult journey as they navigated the challenges of having a sick child.

It’s a subject they are uniquely familiar with from a personal experience that led to the founding of their nonprofit in 2010.

Mattea’s Joy was named after Gary’s and Jamie’s daughter, Mattea Joy Freedlund, who was born in 2009 with severe medical complications.

Though Mattea wasn’t expected to survive at birth, she defied odds and lived nine and a half months. The majority of that time was spent in hospitals, giving the Freedlunds a crash course in what it meant to be parents of a critically ill child.

For the past 15 years, their brief time with Mattea has inspired them to help families in similar circumstances. Through their nonprofit, they provide care packages, meals, snack boxes and other support for families with hospitalized children. Their services have reached tens of thousands of families over the years.

Mattea’s Joy also hosts annual fundraising events meant to bring joy and a sense of community to those families, including a Princess Breakfast, SuperHero 5K and Golf “Fore” Joy golf outing.

“One year of our lives allowed us to empathize and serve others in ways we couldn’t have imagined before,” the Mattea’s Joy website reads.

The Freedlunds also couldn’t have imagined that they would once again be the ones in the position of needing help when another child got sick.

The couple has talked with countless people over the years who have survived cancer or are the parents of kids that have survived cancer.

In a previous career, Gary worked as a child life specialist in a pediatric oncology unit.

Jamie interviewed someone for her podcast, Joy in the Journey, who survived the same type of cancer Cooper had before he was ever diagnosed.

They seem as though they would be more prepared than most to face what lay ahead.

That doesn’t mean they had all the answers.

“We have a unique background when it comes to kids with cancer,” Jamie said. “It does not make it easier to have your kid diagnosed with cancer. It’s interesting, we knew the things that helped you manage it well, but it still doesn’t make it easy.”

Choosing Joy

Jamie has recorded over 80 episodes of the Joy in the Journey podcast, where she interviews families who have been through different health scenarios.

She took a break shortly before Cooper’s diagnosis but hopes to resume recording soon.

“I saw the need of families feeling lonely and just needing to hear someone else’s story, to say, ‘Oh, that feels familiar to me,’ and hopefully glean some tips out of it,” Jamie said. “… You can get through the hard parts if you hear how someone else coped through it.”

“I think that’s the No.1 focus point,” Garry said. “Which is, providing a community for these families to know that they’re not alone.”

Mattea’s Joy also provides Transfer Packets including food, gas and parking gift cards, driving directions and tips for parents transferred from a local hospital to Comer Children’s Hospital. Written on the outside of the packet is, “You’ve got this.”

“I used to think Mattea’s Joy would get bigger and we’d do bigger things, and I realized over time, we just need to do small things for more people, because sometimes the small things are what families need,” Jamie said. “They need somebody to say, when you’re in the slog of it all, ‘You’ve got this.’ It’s really hard, and it’s OK that it’s hard. You can choose joy in the middle of the really hard.”

For about five years, Jamie has been hosting workshops that teach others how to “find joy” through the journey of life’s ups and downs.

When she learned her son had cancer, she had to put the principles she had been promoting into practice.

Even knowing all the right steps and routines, choosing joy can still be difficult, she said.

But it is not impossible.

One of the things that makes it possible is to help others.

“Our motto is, ‘Give joy, feel joy,’ ” Jamie said. “It’s often getting outside yourself and doing something for somebody else, even when you want to turn inward and be like, ‘This really sucks.’ ”

It’s something the couple try to teach all of their children, including Reese, 18; Cooper, 13; and Kipton, 9.

While Cooper was in the hospital, his parents encouraged him to find ways to use some of the money that the community fundraised for him to help other hospitalized kids.

Jamie also continued delivering meals on other floors of the hospital during that time.

“We still find that that’s the best way to find the joy, is to still give,” Gary said. “Even amongst our own journey, we were trying to help others through theirs.”

“It’s because of our experience that we know that’s where the joy is,” Jamie said. “We can’t put the thing on hold that we know brings the joy.”