Young cancer survivor teams up with Riverhead business to help other children facing cancer

Hannah Prokop, a student at Mattituck High School, was only seven years old when she was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. And in a heartbeat, her whole world changed.

Hannah was told she had Medullablastoma, with a mass the size of a small lemon, her mother Kim Prokop said.

She was ripped from her life as a happy, healthy second grader and plunged into a new reality of nausea, radiation and chemotherapy.

But today, seven years later, Hannah is cancer-free — and, remembering what it was like to be a little girl who spent long days in hospitals, she has dedicated herself to helping other children who are faced with the unthinkable.

“Hannah’s Cans for Cancer” began when Hannah and her parents began bringing cans back to the supermarket, collecting five cents each and using the funds to help buy art supplies and toys, candy and books for other children in pediatric wards where Hannah spent so much of her childhood.

Hannah doesn’t remember much of the pain, or of how very ill she was during that long year. But what she will always remember, and what has shaped her heartfelt mission to reach out to other little children facing the same grown-up challenges, is the fun she had in the pediatric centers of the hospitals where she stayed.

“They try to make it fun,” KIm Prokop said. “When she wasn’t throwing up or in therapy, she was playing, doing projects. They make them feel like kids — they can still play. They’re getting chemotherapy while they’re coloring.”

When Hannah was declared cancer-free — important milestones were first one year, and then five, free of cancer — one of the first things she embarked upon was the creation of her foundation, “Hannah’s Cans for Cancer,” an organization now on the way to not-for-profit status, so that she could help fill other Child Life Services areas of hospitals with art supplies and board games.

“It was Hannah’s idea. It really came from the prospective of Hannah liking to be busy in the hospital,” Prokop said. “Many times we went down to Child Life and the markers were dry or they didn’t have a supply of games and it got boring. We were just looking for a way to give back. Hannah is a crafty person and it just started with us making a few donations.”

Initially, what began as a bake sale, with proceeds going to Spaulding Rehabilitation in Boston, grew into the collection of cans, with proceeds to benefit a number of hospitals.

And that’s where Kevin McKillop, owner of Riverhead Beverage on Osborn Avenue, came in to team up with Hannah and help grow the project. To date, “Hannah’s Cans for Cancer” has raised $30,000 in just about five years.

McKillop said he was motivated to help after seeing Hannah and her dad at the supermarket, putting the empty cans in the machine, one by one. “It looked like it was quite the daunting task,” he said. “So I volunteered my services.”

As a New York State licensed redemption center, Riverhead Beverage is set up to count the empties for Hannah, wash the cans, and just give her the funds. “We take care of everything so she’s not in front of the machine for two hours. We have everything already set up. It’s a no-brainer,” he said.

McKillop said under the New York State bottle law, currently, almost $100 million goes unclaimed every year, as empty containers go unredeemed, ending up in landfills or incinerators. Hannah, he said, is not only helping other children with cancer, she’s spreading awareness about recycling. “She’s an environmentalist and she might now even know it,” he said.

But, while he felt compelled to help Hannah, McKillop said the project is her brainchild. “We’re just a contractor. We’re a part of her team,” he said.

People drop off cans at the Prokops’ Mattituck home. “There are always cans in our driveway,” Prokop said. Or, they leave cans for Hannah’s foundation at Riverhead Beverage.

On her blog, “Hannah’s Journey,” the teen describes how one diagnosis changed her life: “I had to go to lots of different hospitals with different machines to help me. It was very hard for me because some of the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong at some times. I would just keep going through the same routine every day with lots of stress. Some days were better than others. I would go to therapy every day and I would love to ride my bike around. I would even get to ride it all around the hospital. I would ride it around the Saint Charles hospital, go to get my favorite cookies in the cafeteria, and my favorite thing was to go down on the first floor where my mom from my room could see me on the security camera. In my journey to fight cancer I went through lots of challenges. I successfully overcame my challenges and I am now living a happy healthy life. I could have never overcome cancer if I didn’t have all the help I had pushing me to keep trying.”

Describing her daughter’s journey, Kim Prokop said when she and her husband David and their older daughter Colby, now 17, learned that Hannah had cancer, their world was turned up side down.

“She started throwing up in the morning, and that was going on for a year, getting progressively worse.”

Because she did not initially have the traditional symptoms of brain cancer, including severe headaches and falling down, it took six internists to find a diagnosis.

“It was very frustrating. One doctor told me, ‘Go home, she’s fine.'”

One Friday, Hannah came home from school and told her parents that her head was hurting badly. They called a doctor, who scheduled Hanna for an MRI — and then heard the words that no parent should ever have to bear: “Your daughter has a brain tumor, and it’s malignant.

“It doesn’t really sink in at first,” Prokop said. “It was very scary.”

As a mother, Prokop went straight to the computer, desperate for information, for understanding. “The whole family was frantically Googling,” she said. “It’s not like you can just call someone in your network who’s had brain surgery. The whole thing was very fast-paced.”

By the following Friday, their 7-year-old child had brain surgery at Stony Brook. Next, she was moved to St. Charles Hospital in Port Jefferson, to an in-patient rehab. Their little girl, a bright ray of sunshine who loved to run and play, had lost the use of her left side.

“She couldn’t really speak,” Prokop said. “She couldn’t walk.”

And after four weeks, Prokop said, Hannah needed radiation, which meant a trip to the Spauding Rehabilitation Network in Boston, followed by nine months of chemotherapy at the Cohen Children’s Medical Center at North Shore-LIJ Health in New Hyde Park.

Her chemotherapy ended on December 21, 2007, more than 10 months after her initial surgery.

“That first year was really intense,” Prokop said. As a second grader, her daughter was old enough to know something was wrong, and to be able to express unhappiness with IVs, but not old enough to rebel, as a teenager might, and say, ‘I’m not doing this.'”

“I remember my mom and I were in the room with the surgeon,” Hannah said. “I had a big IV in my arm. He showed us the scans and said it was the size of a golf ball and said, ‘You have a brain tumor.’ We were just in shock.”

Over the dark year, her parents did their best to keep their little girl’s life filled with happy moments. “I was there for the treatment, the emotional parts, and her dad did fun things — he played a lot of games,” Prokop said. “When something like this happens to you, you just do what you have to do to get your child through to tomorrow.”

But it was a long road. “She had to work her way back up,” Prokop said. “In Boston, in the in-patient rehab, she couldn’t even hold her head up.”

Years later, Prokop said her daughter is a teenager passionate about baking and recently just enjoyed a stint as a prop person for the Mattituck High School play.

Still, there is a thin blanket of worry that envelops her mother’s heart. “I was bold enough to ask the doctor once if he had seen recurrences of Hannah’s type of tumor. He said, ‘I’m not going to lie to you. Some kids have recurrences at 10 years out.’ But you try not to think about it. You think about everyday things, such as school. You can’t live that way.”

In the Child Life centers, both kids and parents find their anxiety and stress lifting; play is therapy, Prokop said.

“I definitely remember when I was in the hospital, we had crafts and they had some board games,” Hannah said last week. “When I started my foundation I wanted to give kids more board games to play with, to make them happier.”

Hannah enjoys shopping online with her mother, picking out toys, balls, crafts and stickers for the kids.

To other children facing cancer, Hannah has wise words of advice: “I would definitely say that it might seem like a long time, you know you’re going to get through it. Stay confident,” she said.

Today, Hannah’s thoughts are those of a young girl who loves decorating her cupcakes — she likes cookies and cream-flavored the best — and hopes to open a bakery one day. She loves her three dogs and her rabbits, and enjoys lacrosse; she used to love horseback riding, too, she said.

Hannah also raises funds at street fairs. Last year, at a Mattituck event, she baked hundreds of cupcakes, including a popular favorite, red velvet.

Another highlight of the year is when they bring Halloween to the pediatric unit of the hospital, where Hannah and her family dress up in costume to bring goodie bags, over 500 of them, to all the children.

Reflecting on her daughter’s life after cancer, Prokop said the good news is that she only has to have a followup MRI every other year. “She’s doing well,” she said. But she still needs to grapple with nausea and other lasting effects of her illness. “We’re thankful for where she is now,” she said. “But some people think when you have cancer, and it’s gone, it’s gone. The truth is, you’re never back to where you were — you’re moving forward from where you are now. A lot of things have changed for her.”

Hannah, who loves to play tennis and adores horses, has learned life lessons far beyond her years, her mothers aid. “We realize now that everybody is going through something and it might not be outwardly visible. It’s important to remember that people need to be treated with kindness and compassion because everyone has something that they’re going through.”

Her daughter, Prokop said, has taught her the meaning of courage and resilience. “She does have a lot of perseverance, I’l tell you that. She’s never been a kid that asks, ‘Why is this happening?’ Instead, she’s always said, ‘What do I have to do next?'”

The focus remains firmly fixed on the positive, Prokop said. “We can’t spend every day thinking we’re unhappy because of this. We just have to focus on the fact that we’re happy because she’s made it to where she is now – and she’s doing pretty darned good.”