Sharing a little joy
Autumn Jackson, like most 7-year-olds, was an active little girl.
She took ballet and karate lessons and just enjoyed life, her mother said. Then, after returning from spending the summer of 2014 with her aunt in Tuscaloosa, the young Hoover girl began complaining of lower back pain.
At first, her mother thought maybe she had injured her back somehow while playing in Tuscaloosa, but then she started to see a shift in Autumn’s shoulders and that her spine was not as straight as it once was.
Her mother, Shamarold Tate, took her to an urgent care center in Hoover, where the doctor took an X-ray and looked at her spine. He tapped her knee and knew something was wrong when he got no reflex reaction.
The doctor referred Autumn to a neurosurgeon at Children’s of Alabama, and the neurosurgeon discovered a large tumor that ran from the bottom of her neck all the way down her spinal cord, her mother said.
Thankfully, the tumor was not fast-growing. Instead of choosing a surgery that might not completely remove the tumor and could potentially leave Autumn paralyzed, her mother chose chemotherapy instead.
Autumn went through 16 months of chemotherapy, which ended in January, Tate said. As of the last check, the tumor had not grown, but it had not shrunk either, Tate said.
Autumn is dealing with severe scoliosis — an abnormal lateral curvature of the spine. She has a brace that is supposed to keep her spine from curving, but it hasn’t seemed to help much, her mother said.
She’s 9 now, and doctors plan to do surgery when she turns 10 or 11 to permanently put rods in her spine, her mother said.
But for now, they’re just waiting and hoping the chemotherapy has helped and considering the use of other medicine if chemotherapy turns out not to have worked. Autumn is living life pretty much like a normal kid, but she has some limitations, her mother said.
She wants to do gymnastics, but the doctor doesn’t recommend it. She also wants to dance, but her mother is not sure about that, either. Autumn occasionally stumbles and loses her balance because of the curvature of her spine, so her mother recommended playing the piano as a hobby instead.
Autumn is a third-grader at South Shades Crest Elementary School, but students at another Hoover school — Simmons Middle School — recently reached out to bring a little extra joy to Autumn’s life.
Since January, Simmons students have held several fundraisers to collect money so Autumn could go on a four-night, five-day Disney cruise to the Bahamas, organized by the Magic Moments wish-granting organization.
At first, students paid $1 to be able to wear sweatpants or gym shorts to school for a day. The students liked it so much that the fundraiser brought in a little more than $900, including some extra donations, Principal Brian Cain said. So school officials scheduled a second sweatpants and gym shorts day and raised the price to $5. More than 500 kids brought $5 to participate, Cain said.
Simmons officials also let students sit anywhere in the lunchroom they wanted for a $1 donation (instead of having to sit with their particular class). In all, students raised more than $5,000 with the various fundraisers, Cain said.
The best part about it was that students weren’t just bringing the money for the special privileges, Cain said. Many brought extra and said to keep the change. It was great to see middle school students thinking beyond themselves, he said.
“We live in such a ‘me’ world,” Cain said. “If we can just slow everybody down a little bit and take care of people, that’s just as important as math and science and language arts.”
He’s proud of the way Simmons students responded, he said.
The student body at Simmons helped announce the Disney cruise to Autumn in March with a special schoolwide assembly that Magic Moments Executive Director Joyce Spielberger said was “hands down one of the best (wish reveals) I have ever seen for one of our children.”
The Simmons band played music from Disney’s “Aladdin” movie, and girls dressed up as just about every Disney princess imaginable to present Autumn with gifts. A boy dressed up as the genie in “Aladdin” jumped off the stage in a puff of smoke to give Autumn the big news about the cruise, and students in the bleachers held up signs that spelled out “Disney cruise” and “Simmons loves Autumn!”
“It was just beautifully orchestrated,” Spielberger said. “Autumn was so overwhelmed by the attention she cried tears of joy and let me tell you, she was not the only one crying. There were not many dry eyes that afternoon.”
Autumn said she was surprised and happy about the cruise and is looking forward to it. But she isn’t the only one who gets to go on the cruise in late May. She will be joined by her mother, grandmother, aunt and a female cousin for a girls’ getaway.
Her mother said the trip will give Autumn a much-needed break from all the hospital and doctor visits. “She’s been through so much,” Tate said. “She was very excited about it.”
Her mother said she was deeply touched by the generosity of the Simmons students. They have no idea how much this means, she said.
As a single mother, she has struggled with paying bills, lost two jobs because she had to miss days at work to take Autumn for her treatments, had one car repossessed and the transmission go out on another, she said. She currently has no transportation and definitely has not been able to afford a vacation like this, she said.
“This is the best thing we’ve had happen since she was diagnosed,” Tate said. “I can’t show them possibly how much this has been a blessing and how I’m very appreciative. This is something I’ll never forget. I’m so grateful to that school — those kids … That really made her day.”
A GoFundMe account has been set up to help pay for Autumn’s medical expenses and other expenses for her family at gofundme.com/autumnsjourney.