Alumna builds career on assisting children with serious health problems

Child-life specialist Melissa Deifer Hicks said that children often have mistaken ideas about the cause of their serious illnesses. For example, she said, some children think they are sick because they misbehaved.

In her work, Hicks helps children change mistaken impressions, which can have an impact on how well they cope with and progress through their illnesses and their lives. She works with children and their families through initial diagnosis, prognosis and the pain of disease, its treatment and its outcome.

Child-life specialist is a relatively new profession, one that Hicks didn't know existed when she was a student at the University of Delaware.

After graduating from high school in Whitehall, Pa., she said her intention was to become a pediatric physical therapist. It was something she had thought about doing since she was a child. "I remember watching the Jerry Lewis telethons on TV, and all I wanted to do was help those children walk," Hicks said.

She entered the pre-physical therapy program in UD's College of Arts and Science, but a course she took in her sophomore year changed her life. Taught by Dene Klinzing, professor of individual and family studies, "The Hospitalized Child" was a course for people planning to become child-life professionals but was open to anyone who would be working with children in a hospital setting.

"When I heard Dr. Klinzing describe what a child-life professional does, I realized that was exactly what I wanted to do," Hicks said. A volunteer placement, and then a position as a child-life assistant, at the Alfred I duPont Hospital for Children that affirmed her decision.

She changed her major and immersed herself in learning the things she'd need to know to work with children and families in medical crisis.

As a child-life specialist, Hicks had to learn the way children respond to illness and hospitalization and what factors guide those responses before she could help allay their fears. She needed a working knowledge of the medical terms used in discussing children's health care, and she had to be able to put those terms in language simple enough for a child to comprehend.

Klinzing arranged an internship for Hicks at Johns Hopkins Hospital Children's Center during her last semester at UD, and, after graduation, she went to work there.

She was part of the child-life team in the pediatric oncology inpatient and bone marrow transplant unit.

Three years after joining the child-life team at Johns Hopkins, Hicks had another mind-changing experience. Belinda Ledbetter, the child-life supervisor at Hopkins, was one of the first child-life specialists in Operation Smile, an organization that sends teams of plastic surgeons to developing nations to operate on children who have facial abnormalities. Ledbetter convinced Hicks to volunteer.

In 1991, she was sent to Kenya, where, during a three-week tour, she worked with more then 100 children.

In 1995, Hicks moved to Georgia to work for the AFLAC Cancer Center at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, the largest single pediatric cancer institution in the Southeast.

Last year, she was elected president of the Child Life Council for 2002-04. The organization promotes child-life education for its 1,800 members and offers voluntary certification for child-life professionals.

In addition, Hicks has been working on a series of children's books that use everything she's learned working with hospitalized children. The books deal with such topics as the death of a childhood friend, pain and how to manage it and cancer–from diagnosis to returning to school.

No matter where her expertise takes her, Hicks said the children and how she can help them are her bottom line. And, while she remembers all of them, one in particular remains vivid in her memories.

"He was a 10-year-old diagnosed with cancer. When he first came to the hospital, I had to spend a lot of time helping him understand the disease and then coping with the treatment. He had a difficult course of treatment but never lost his will to fight. We focused on expressing his emotions and maintaining some normality in his life. When his cancer returned, and he knew the end was near, he wrote letters to important people in his life and made things to give people. He made me a bracelet, and I will always cherish it. That little boy taught me valuable lessons about life and living."