EagleTribune.com, North Andover, MA
Merrimack Valley
No strings attached
It's decision time again. How will you better yourself in 2009? Perhaps by selflessly helping others?
Published: January 1, 2009
When Cathy McGrath awoke from surgery in 2001, she couldn't imagine returning to the way things used to be.
She roamed the hospital in a johnny laden with post strings of surgical apparatus, the baggage of having a tumor removed from her breast.
"I had so many drains, one nurse suggested I go to Home Depot and buy a tool belt to carry them all," McGrath said.
Three days later, McGrath went home and climbed back into her own clothes.
"I picked my daughter up from Girl Scouts, helped my kids with school projects, did all the things a mother does," she said.
And yet, she did not feel like herself — especially with all those plastic drains still pinned to her clothing, for everyone to see.
So for her next surgery, McGrath was prepared.
"I took my husband's white oxford shirt and cut a slit in the sleeves," she said, and she slipped a few of the drains in its pockets.
"It was comfortable," she added. "And it wasn't scary for my kids to see me."
From this was born the Jacki, a McGrath-original female version of the traditional scanty exam gown.
The Jacki now is used in nearly two dozen hospitals across the state. Locally, it has been supplied to Caritas Holy Family Hospital in Methuen, and McGrath is hopeful they will be at Lowell General Hospital in the near future.
Compared to the traditional johnny, the Jacki is more becoming, more utilitarian, and a whole lot more comfortable, McGrath said.
The Jacki trademark is its Polartech material, called wicking, which is designed to move sweat away from the skin to the outer surface of the fabric where it evaporates. Tailored into a black wrap-around gown, it looks more like a sweater than a medical robe.
Velcro openings stretch down each arm for easy access to chemotherapy and radiation tubes. They're dressed up with buttons, for decoration and to trick outsiders into the thinking it's an ordinary jacket. The Jacki is lined with what McGrath calls "surround sound pockets" — for all that post surgical apparatus.
"No one even knows they are there," she said.
She designed the Jacki in the waiting rooms of hospitals, while fighting her own breast cancer.
"I thought, 'Jackie Kennedy Onassis wouldn't wear the johnny,'" she said, noting that this thought and its jacket-like appearance resulted in the product's name.
McGrath donated her first Jacki prototype to Tufts-New England Medical Center, then a second order of them went to Brigham and Women's Hospital. Before long, all the Boston hospitals wanted to supply the Jacki.
"I wanted to do something to empower women to take their lives back. I wanted to restore their dignity and control," McGrath said.
McGrath and Maureen Cardinal, her longtime neighbor, joined forces in 2003 when the Jacki began to take off. They formed a nonprofit organization, A Little Easier Recovery, to raise money to keep up with orders.
"Originally, I went into database marketing, but by the time I was in my 30s I'd retired," Cardinal said. "I met Cathy at a neighborhood graduation party."
Today, a range of patients, including those battling leukemia and those in hospice care, has worn the Jacki — even men, since McGrath and Cardinal recently created a male version, called the Jack.
"I got the idea for the Jack from the former superintendent in Fall River. He said he was sick and needed something more comfortable to wear," McGrath said.
"I told him that it's a women's garment, and he said he didn't care. He was really sick, but I never asked what he had," she added.
She never asks for patients' names or diagnoses, she said.
At the home base of A Little Easier Recovery on High Street in Andover, McGrath and Cardinal work tirelessly to keep up with orders and find sponsors. Those sponsors now include GenTech, a pharmaceutical company, Toshiba Business Solutions, which supplies free office equipment, and Polartech, their fabric supplier.
Last year alone, the full-time volunteers donated more than 800 Jackis directly to patients, through treatment centers all over the state. In return, they've received hundreds of letters from appreciative recipients.
"There are certain ones that really tug at your heart," McGrath said.
One of her favorites reads, "Thank you for making the most scariest part of my life a little easier to deal with."
McGrath's secret is that she doesn't sew, never has. But there's one vice that helped convince her to invent the Jacki in the first place.
"You know how some people are shoe freaks?" she asked. "I'm a coat freak. I've just always loved them. I have tons."
That was secondary, however, to helping people cope with the kinds of devastating illnesses she herself has battled firsthand.
"I just wanted to pay it forward," McGrath said. "I know from experience how important it is for these people to do anything they can to feel more like themselves, the way they were before they got sick."
