Meet Jacob, the 2023 Champion for The Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital!

From birth, Jacob Thiboutot’s family described him as “an energetic, goofball-of-a-child” who was too busy to even sit on his mother’s lap, but at 18 months old, that all changed. The sudden onset of debilitating symptoms led Jacob’s family to their local emergency department. Noting that Jacob’s abdomen was enlarged, the emergency room physician ordered a series of tests and determined that Jacob needed to be rushed to The Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital (BBCH) at Maine Medical Center.

The Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital oncology team met Jacob and his family in the Emergency Department. Tests showed a cantaloupe-sized, cancerous tumor in his abdomen and many small tumors along his spine and behind his eye. The cancer had also spread to his bone marrow. Jacob began his first of six rounds of chemotherapy at BBCH on June 20, 2016, the same day he received his stage 4 neuroblastoma diagnosis. 

This tiny warrior endured chemotherapy, major abdominal surgery, two bone marrow transplants, and weeks of immunotherapy treatments, finally completing 18 months of intensive treatment on October 17, 2017, just in time to celebrate his 3rd birthday.

Today, at 8 years old, Jacob remains in remission and is back to his spunky, curious self.  The Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital and Maine Children’s Cancer Program didn’t just save Jacob’s life, his parents explain, but they left Jacob with fond memories of his “BBCH Family” during his time in treatment: “If you ask him about his time at The Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital, he gets so excited because some of his favorite people in the world are there. And it’s because they helped him through some of the hardest points in his life.”