The Inspiration Is Mutual at Hospital

Robert Ford sat on the edge of his hospital bed Monday morning, smiling like a football player who had just won a national championship.

Standing in front of him were Alex Holmes and John David Booty, USC football players who have a chance to do just that Thursday in the Rose Bowl by beating Michigan.

And so, for a few minutes at City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte, Robert, a 15-year-old sickle cell anemia patient from Altadena, could forget about the pain, physical and emotional, of the disease that has gripped him for a decade.

“I’m feeling a whole lot better,” Robert said while surrounded by the players, relatives and television cameras.

Such moments were plentiful during the eighth annual visit of Rose Bowl participants to the hospital, a national leader in bone marrow transplant and cancer research.

It began at 9 a.m., with introductions of the head coaches of USC and Michigan, as well as Rose Queen Megan Chinen and her royal court, and a couple of Disney characters. But the theme of the players’ much-anticipated visit -- one that outpatients scheduled their appointments to coincide with -- was hardly Mickey Mouse.

“To have a chance to sit with [the patients] and hear them say we give them hope, it’s just that spirit of getting better that gives us hope,” said USC Coach Pete Carroll, who also spent time with Robert and about half a dozen other patients in the hospital’s pediatric ward.

Carroll’s counterpart, Lloyd Carr, visited the bone marrow transplant unit with Michigan freshmen Shawn Crable and Jake Long.

The patients they visited were either awaiting a transplant or had just had one, and were greatly at risk of infection. Consequently, 29-year-old Michael Gantman had to welcome his visitors through a small window in the door of his isolation room.

“It’s always a wake-up call to go in and see people fighting for their lives,” said Carr, who visited City of Hope in 1997, before his Wolverines beat Washington State in the ’98 Rose Bowl. “It’s emotional, no doubt about it. You realize just how blessed you are.”

The two-hour event seemed an appropriate pit stop for the players -- nine from USC and seven from Michigan -- during their busy week. But somewhere between the meet-and-greet session that kicked off the event and the stops in the patients’ rooms, it became a lot more than just a break between practices.

“It means so much to me personally,” said Booty, the Trojans’ heralded freshman quarterback from Shreveport, La. “I’ve come a long way away [to go to USC], and some of these kids here have come a long way to get the proper care they need.

“Even though they’re in a much more difficult situation, because they’re fighting for their lives, I still felt we were able to communicate.”

For the patients, the visits were opportunities to forget, momentarily at least, the IV lines, the results of that morning’s tests, the wondering whether they’ll be alive to see another Rose Bowl after this one.

“I’ve never actually got to meet any famous players, and these guys are pretty famous right now,” said Alex Brandt, 16, a cancer patient from Moreno Valley. “This is kind of like my make-a-wish.”

As for Robert Ford, who was still smiling a winner’s smile long after the players left his room, it was again a time to be reminded that he isn’t alone in his fight.

“It means a lot to have somebody come see me when I’m sick,” said Robert, who was diagnosed when he was 5 and has been in and out of the hospital ever since. “I’m really feeling better after having [the players] here.”

No one can appreciate that more than Robert’s mother, Lorna, who said of the disease her younger of two sons continues to battle: “It’s not like other [diseases].... You’re in pain, severe pain.

“So things like these are very uplifting.”

The smile on her son’s face was proof of that.