Lindsey Wilkerson was given a tour when she first began working in the event and patient-liaison department at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis more than 14 years ago.
As she made her initial rounds through the pediatric treatment and research facility that day, a staff member said to her, “There’s someone here we would like you to see.”
Ms. Wilkerson, who had been married for less than a year at the time, was led to a small conference room where she was thrilled to be reintroduced to Joel Alsup, a friend she first met in 1993, when she was 12 and he was 13. They hadn’t seen each other since high school.
“I remember having a huge crush on him as kids,” she said.
He liked her as well, but had trouble expressing his feelings. “She was very pretty,” said Mr. Alsup, who had been hired in January 2003 as the hospital’s information and technology coordinator, “but I was an extremely shy 13-year-old who was afraid to talk to her.”
It was indeed a rather impromptu reunion, the kind of get-together that would not have been promised to either of them two decades earlier, when Ms. Wilkerson and Mr. Alsup were childhood cancer patients receiving treatments at what is now their current place of employment.
“St. Jude saved both of our lives,” said Ms. Wilkerson, who is still in the event and patient liaison department.
She learned in 1991 she had acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
“I remember the terrified family,” said Dr. Melissa M. Hudson, the pediatric oncologist who first treated Ms. Wilkerson and is now a member of the St. Jude faculty and the director of its Cancer Survivorship Division.
“She had lots of ups and downs in her treatment and she struggled with toxicity,” Dr. Hudson said. “She was a strong little girl.”
Four years earlier, Mr. Alsup and his family learned he had osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer, which resulted in the amputation of his right arm.
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