SAN ANTONIO — A non-profit is working to make sure every child in University Hospital has the chance to dress up for Halloween.
For a child with a major illness, wearing a costume on Halloween can be more than a fun game of pretend; it can be an escape.
"For the girls, I love the butterflies. For the boys, always the superheroes,” said Stay Strong Foundation President Debi Harper while digging through a box full of costumes.
Harper is taking stock of this year's collection of Halloween costumes.
Collecting them is a tradition her son, Stay Strong Foundation CEO Noah Adams began before starting the non-profit which strives to brighten the lives of children in the hospital.
Noah learned about his own cancer completely by accident. He thought he had hurt is leg on a skateboard.
"In the height of the pandemic, he decided to pick up skateboarding," Harper said "His brother had left behind a skateboard when he joined the Navy,”
Harper said she was hesitant to bring her son to the hospital in the summer of 2020 as it was filling up with COVID patients. Once she relented, she said that an MRI the doctors had ordered on his leg "lit up like a Christmas tree." Noah was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer called Ewing’s Sarcoma.
“Everyone has a quarantine story, right?" Adams said over zoom from his college apartment in Pittsburgh.
Unable to have visitors because of the pandemic, Adams said he was touched when he got his own COVID parade.
"I've never really been religious. But that was the first time I felt spiritual," he said.
Adams said that moment got him motivated to do something more. a few months later, as Halloween was approaching, he figured out how.
"The most fun holidays where we get to spend time with friends and family or do fun activities,” Adams said. “Those are the ones where some kids just have to stay in the hospital."
The non-profit has collected 800 costumes over the past four years, but since University Health Care opened a new Women and Children's Hospital, the need has grown.
in 2023, the foundation is trying to collect 400 costumes for University Hospital patients.
"A lot of teenagers are forgotten about," Harper said. "We really try to purchase for teenagers when people give us money, because teenagers sometimes get left behind."
Noah was 17-years-old when he was diagnosed. His treatment involved amputating his leg. While in treatment he and his mother had developed a shirt that zipped open to more easily allow medical equipment to be attached. They called them I.C.O.N. shirts (In Care of Noah) Once his treatment was finished, they and started making them in large numbers for patients at University health.
Knowing the amount of work involved in making the shirts, collecting costumes for Halloween, and the Christmas toy drive they had also started, Harper felt the need to tell her Son they would need to start a non-profit to be able to manage the workload.
"'How hard could it be?'" she recalled him saying.
Since he went to college at the University of Pittsburgh, Noah has expanded the efforts of the Stay Strong Foundation to benefit children in his new adopted city as well.
Drop-boxes for the costume collection are at the following locations.
- HANCOCK WHITNEY BANK, 19122 N HWY 281 SUITE 101, SATX 78259
- THE VANITY PARLOR, 4833 MCCULLOUGH, SATX 78212
- COLDWELL BANKER D'ANN HARPER, 7523 N. LOOP 1604 WEST SATX 78249
People can also donate directly at this link.