Before she woke up in the hospital after her mastectomy 12 years ago, Cathy McGrath knew her breast would be gone. What she didn't plan for was multiple post-surgical drains — little plastic bulbs with a long tube — to collect fluid.
"I was really taken aback by it," the North Andover woman said. "I thought, how am I going to manage all of these?"
A nurse told her some women pin the drains to their clothes or go to Home Depot and get a tool belt to put them in.
So McGrath asked herself: What would Princess Di or Jackie O do?
"I thought there's no way they'd be going to Home Depot," she said. "They'd want something incognito, discreet, but with a lot of functionality to it, something that would make them look more like a person than a patient."
So McGrath designed the Jacki, a post-surgical jacket for breast cancer patients, and started A Little Easier Recovery, a nonprofit to give the garments away to patients.
On the outside, the Jacki looks like a classic suit jacket in black or plum. But on the inside, it has pockets all the way around the bottom.
The initial version was made of Polartec fleece. But when McGrath told her story to Polartec, the company gave her a deal on a soft, wicking material that is now used in many of the jackets. The rest are made of interlocking cotton.
In the beginning, her aunt sewed the garments, and McGrath gave them to Brigham and Women's Hospital and Tufts Medical Center. When the hospitals told her that patients loved them, she realized she was on to something and applied for nonprofit status, giving her organization a name that she thought was "humble" but fitting.
"There's absolutely nothing easy about cancer treatment," McGrath said. "The most I could give patients was a little easier recovery."
Since then, her nonprofit has given away more than 10,000 of the garments nationwide and been named a finalist in this year's MassChallenge startup accelerator and competition.
McGrath never meets the patients who wear her jackets, but she has received letters from them, like the woman who delivered her father's eulogy wearing the Jacki, or the one who wore it to her son's wedding, or the woman who was just content to wear it while she played Thomas the Train with her toddler.
"It gives patients some sense of dignity as they recover from a surgery that's affected their body image," said Cate Mullen, the nurse coordinator at Tufts Breast Center, which receives about 150 of the jackets each year. "There's a lot of pain, so it's a big relief that it's easier to get into and out of. It's a wonderful thing we can offer them."
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