HUG-AHEART A group of women at Christian Fellowship Church provide thousands of heart-shaped pillows to Boone Health breast surgery patients. BY MADISON LOETHEN
14
BOONE HEALTH
Fall 2021
T
wice a month, a group of women at Christian Fellowship Church in Columbia meet with their sewing machines and get to work. They sew stuffed heart pillows and seat belt covers for Boone Health patients who recently underwent breast surgery. Their program is called Hug-A-Heart, and they are responsible for donating thousands of pillows to patients. The group was started by Linda McBee in 2017 shortly after she moved to town from Springfield, Missouri, and began attending church at Christian Fellowship. “I was involved in this kind of ministry in my church in Springfield, and I wanted to bring it here,” Linda says. “I lost two very dear friends to breast cancer and I’m a cancer survivor myself. I came to the church and showed them what I did. I told them I’d like to bring this to Christian Fellowship, so they posted it on the website, and little by little, women started coming to help.” Anne Petersen, MD of Boone Health General Surgery, has found the pillows to be very helpful to her patients. “I really love the Hug-A-Heart program,” she says. “The pillows are provided for patients who undergo any type of breast surgery, both men and women, and also occasionally after surgery for melanoma where we’re working across the chest or in
