July 29nd – Prescott Park, Portsmouth, NH

From the pages of the Seacoast Online

July 29, 2011

PORTSMOUTH – A special crowd watched Dorothy and Toto trek down the Yellow Brick Road on Thursday.

More than 200 cancer patients and their family members were treated to a free viewing of “The Wizard of Oz” at Prescott Park by the nonprofit Amy’s Treat. The organization aims to enrich the lives of cancer patients treated at the Seacoast Cancer Center at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover. ATWizardOz728_003Some attendees were Prescott Park Arts Festival regulars and others had never checked out the summer shows before. They all joined together to forget about the disease, if just for one night.

Chris Woodbury, 75, of Ogunquit, Maine, attended with eight grandchildren in tow. Woodbury has persevered through 36 radiation treatments in his fight against prostate cancer, and today is his last day of treatment, he said. “This is a wonderful opportunity to bring these kids,” who were visiting from Colorado, he said. Ingrid Porter, of South Berwick, Maine, made her first visit to the park Thursday with her mother, Heidi Porter, 72, a patient at the cancer center. “I’m really touched by what Amy’s Treat has been able to do,” she said. She said Amy’s Treat does a lot for cancer patients, like giving her mother a $35 gift certificate so she could go out to lunch with a friend. Those gestures return some normalcy to lives rocked by cancer, she said.

Mike Meserve, an Amy’s Treat board member and radiation therapist, said he sees so many people in trying times, and Amy’s Treat helps in small ways, like providing chocolates or organizing fly fishing trips.

Thursday’s trip to the park was by far the largest for Amy’s Treat, he said, and would not have been possible without the help of John Moynihan, the park’s general manager, and Seacoast Trolley, which provided transportation from Dover to Portsmouth.

The charity is named after Amy Maliszewski of Newmarket, who battled cervical cancer and died in 2007 after it spread throughout her body, said her daughter, Rachel O’Neill, 27. “She had this great light inside of her. She inspired this,” she said. Maliszewski’s partner, Lenore Rogers, said cancer patients make hard decisions every day, often about paying the bills. Amy’s Treat is a resource to make those decisions easier, she said. “This is a community. We’re all pulling for one another,” she said.

Kellie Mueller, 42, of Newington, a patient who received a combination of chemotherapy and radiation and has her last day of treatment today, said attending the show felt like a big celebration. “I never met Amy, but I feel like I did because of what they’ve done in her name,” she said. “She must have been an extraordinary person.”

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