'I'm feeling the love': Students' blanket donations bring comfort, warmth to cancer patients

They gather on weekends with a hockey game or a football game on TV and colorfully patterned pieces of fleece in hand, measuring, cutting and tying until each special blanket is complete.

They roll each finished product into a compact cylinder and tie it with a thick white ribbon, adding a carefully cropped tag. “C3” the tag reads, inside a logo adorned with ten colorful handprints and the red outline of a heart.

“C3” stands for Care, Comfort and Compassion, and this isn't the average knitting circle.

The informal charity is a group of 10 siblings — eight of them boys — from four Downers Grove-area families who have been working together since 2015 to bring the three C words implied by the group's name to patients at Rush Cancer Center in Lisle.

C3 participants range in age from 10 to 21, and likely in blanket-making skill as well. But they're equally willing to put in the time to offer a sign of warmth and hope to someone enduring cancer.

It all feels “quite humbling, actually,” to 17-year-old Cayden Doy, a C3 member and student at Fusion Academy in Oak Brook.

The work began three years ago when C3 member Connor Podjasek, now an 18-year-old student at Downers Grove South High School, learned about the struggles the mother of one of his soccer teammates was facing as she battled stage-four breast cancer.

His friend's mom was treated successfully at Rush Cancer Center in Lisle and has gone into recovery. But during her treatments, she told others how cold she'd feel, something teens like Doy and Podjasek didn't realize.

“It's funny because patients don't speak up about how they feel,” Doy said.

But when their friend's mother voiced her chilly concerns, the siblings who now form C3 felt motivated to act — to provide warmth when patients feel cold, comfort when patients feel unease and compassion when patients feel isolation.

In the first year of the project, the siblings and friends learned to make fleece-tie blankets, using small strips of the warm, fuzzy material to bind together two large squares of the fabric into warm and simple quilts. They delivered 18 of the blankets to the cancer center on Warrenville Road the week before Thanksgiving in 2015.

“It was a good experience to see firsthand what sort of impact these blankets have,” Podjasek said. It's immediate and “only positive.”

Patients have expressed hope and a feeling of unexpected support, gratitude and a sense of community — all from receiving a blanket a teen can make in 30 minutes.

“Knowing what we're doing makes a difference is so awesome,” Doy said.

Since the first year's effort of 18 hand-tied blankets, C3's productivity has expanded.

The group in 2016 delivered 140 blankets. Last year, the total rose to 220. And this year's goal was 250, which the organization largely had hit by mid-November, when eight of the 10 members delivered 207 blankets to the cancer center and met patient Tom Kelly.

“All these young men making blankets is great,” said Kelly, of Western Springs, when he met seven boys and one girl from the Daly, Doy, Kohlsaat and Podjasek families who accompanied the stacks of rolled-up blankets in the waiting room. “It's kind of inspiring. It gives me a little more hope.”

At the pre-Thanksgiving delivery, C3 members felt confident they'd reach the 250-blanket goal this year because they knew school groups, Scout groups and religious education classes still were working on donations to send their way.

Anyone can join the C3 effort by giving fleece material, gift cards to fabric or craft stores that sell fleece or completed blankets, year-round, to the 10 founding members. Details about how to join the C3 effort are at https://www.facebook.com/C3forCancer/. The page even includes a link to a YouTube tutorial video the group created to explain to the non-crafty how to make a fleece-tie blanket.

As they brought in their large haul of blankets, the students learned a bit of Kelly's cancer story.

Never a smoker, Kelly was diagnosed nonetheless with lung cancer in 2017. It later spread to his brain. He's been undergoing treatments for the past year at the Rush Cancer Center in Lisle, where he's had radiation and chemotherapy and he now receives immunotherapy about twice a month.

Since his cancer struck, Kelly said he is more sensitive to heat and cold, feeling uncomfortable in both July and January, as well as during temperature spikes and swings in between.

The red-and-black plaid throw he selected after an appointment one Tuesday afternoon would be a comfort and a signal of unanticipated support from a group of kindhearted kids, he said.

“I'm feeling the love of it already, here,” Kelly said, hugging his roll of soft fabric and handmade knots, “before I even open it up.”