Printing hope, spreading cheer

After Ditra Campbell’s father passed away from multiple myeloma in December 2015, she kept thinking about one of his final requests to her.

“He asked me not to grieve. He asked me to stay busy,” Campbell said.

The Christmas tree at Russell Medical Center, where her father received treatment, gave Campbell the inspiration to make Christmas ornaments shaped like cancer awareness ribbons. Campbell, who divides her time between her Vestavia Hills home on Sunset Drive and Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, started out with wood, in honor of her father’s interest in woodworking.

When a friend introduced her to 3D printing, Campbell knew she could make the ornaments not only more durable, but also in a high-tech way that honors the technological advances that helped her father’s treatment. Vestavia Hills Library in the Forest has a 3D printer available for public use, but it took about 10 months for Campbell and the library staff to make it happen.

“The library has been just wonderful,” Campbell said.

Creative coordinator and teen desk clerk Derek Anderson said most people who use the library 3D printer are asked to bring their own model to print. However, when he realized Campbell only needed a simple ribbon design, Anderson said he was happy to find the printing pattern for her.

“This was a very small hurdle that was keeping us from making them,” Anderson said.

In November and December 2016, Campbell and Anderson put the printer to work turning several spools of plastic filaments into ribbons of different colors. Campbell’s goal was to have ribbons for every color associated with cancer awareness by the American Cancer Society and the National Foundation for Cancer Research. If they didn’t have filament in the right color, Campbell printed white ornaments and painted them.

A pair of ribbons takes about 20 minutes to print from start to finish, Campbell said.

Since the ornaments were meant for the Russell Medical Center Christmas tree, which Campbell felt could use more personality and warmth, she received rough estimates of the number of patients at Russell being treated for each type of cancer. That way, each ornament hanging on the tree represented a specific patient.

Plus, there was one burgundy ribbon with the name Bobby Montgomery on the back, in memory of her father. Multiple myeloma is a rare disease, affecting about 200,000 people in the U.S. each year, in which plasma cells in the blood stream become cancerous. The cancer can affect the whole body, including bones, kidneys, the stomach and the immune system. For Montgomery, only five months elapsed between diagnosis and passing away.

Campbell said she was moved by the thought of patients, like her father, who came to the hospital for treatment and stayed there for the remainder of their lives.

“[For] some of these people, this is it for them. That’s it. You can’t fathom it until you live it,” Campbell said.

So, she wanted to do her part to bring some Christmas cheer and remind these patients, though she’ll likely never meet them, that “somebody cared about them specifically” when the ornaments were made.

“There’s just one minute, five minutes of sunshine, that’s not all about the medicine and the ugliness of being ill,” she said.

Campbell delivered the ornaments to Russell in Alexander City before Christmas. However, she doesn’t want that to be the end of her 3D-printed ribbons. If there is interest, Campbell said she would like to continue making the ornaments and sell them online, with 20 percent of net profits benefiting the National Foundation for Cancer Research or Children’s Hospital’s cancer research.

This would not be Campbell’s first time selling products for a good cause. She has a clothing line, called Clothing with a Conscience, which supports awareness efforts of the danger of leaving children unattended in hot cars. However, Campbell said printing ornaments on that scale would require buying her own 3D printer rather than continuing to use the Library in the Forest’s machine.

“This is all about honoring my dad. He made some requests and one is that I help others,” Campbell said.

The Library in the Forest holds regular classes and open labs using the 3D printer. The next introductory class is Jan. 9 at 4 p.m., and the next lab is Jan. 12 at 4 p.m. Call the library at 978-0158 for more information.