For a woman battling breast cancer, a little bit of comfort can go a long way. A group of women in Mount Prospect in Chicago’s northwest suburbs are doing their part to help patients \u2013 one pillow at a time.<\/p>\n
Inside St. Raymond De Penafort Catholic Church, a group of women is creating pillows for breast cancer patients.<\/p>\n
Irene Zaporowicz-Short is one of the ladies using her fingers to create the heart-shaped cushions. She’s also a breast cancer survivor.<\/p>\n
She was diagnosed in 2017. Zaporowicz-Short has been in remission and has been making these pillows for the past three years.<\/p>\n
“If I have a friend who has been diagnosed, I will make her one,” she said. “I did get a pillow when I had surgery at Lutheran General.”<\/p>\n
Once the Women of St. Raymond are done stuffing, the pillows will be donated to Advocate Lutheran General Hospital and two local hospice groups.<\/p>\n
“I walked out with a pillow, and honestly, especially when you have all of the stitches and everything else, and your seatbelt, having that softness up against the seatbelt made a huge difference.”<\/p>\n
The women of St. Raymond have been making these pillows for the past 20 years. They make 100 each year, totaling nearly 2,000 pillows.<\/p>\n
“It’s fun, and it’s good because the women don’t have to sew. They’re just basically making knots, and that’s enough,” said Ginny Neugebauer.<\/p>\n
The group of ladies do this every October for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.<\/p>\n
“It makes you remember your journey and that you’re still here,” Zaporowicz-Short said.<\/p>\n
The women’s group takes up a monthly collection to benefit a charity. This year, donations will go to Northwest Community Hospital Foundation’s “Gift-a-Mammogram” program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For a woman battling breast cancer, a little bit of comfort can go a long way. A group…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":301172,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[15634,141194,960,5386,1818],"class_list":{"0":"post-301171","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-breast-cancer","9":"tag-breast-cancer-awareness-month","10":"tag-chicago","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-illinois"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115369524523230528","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}