It had been nearly fifty years since Jimmy had arrived at Farber’s clinic in Boston from upstate Maine with a diagnosis of lymphoma of the intestines.  Like all his ward mates from the 1950s, Jimmy was presumed long dead.  Not true…he was alive and well…Jimmy-Einar Gustafson…a truck driver in Maine with three children.

And so it was in May 1998, almost exactly fifty years after he had journeyed from small-town Maine to the Children’s Hospital, that Jimmy returned…to the Jimmy Fund.  “Everything has changed…The rooms, the patients, the drugs”.  But more than anything, survivorship had changed.  “Einar [Jimmy] remembered the cancer ward as a place with many curtains…when the children were well, the curtains would be spread open.  But they would soon close the curtains, and there would be no child when they were opened again”.

Here Gustafson was, fifty years later, back in those long hallways with the faded cartoon paintings on the walls, his curtains thrown apart.  It is impossible to know whether Jimmy survived because of surgery, or chemotherapy, or because his cancer had been inherently benign in its behavior. But the facts of his medical history are irrelevant; his return was symbolic.  Jimmy [Einar] had unwittingly been picked to become the icon of the child with cancer.  But Einar Gustafson, now sixty-three years old, had returned as the icon of a man beyond cancer.

From:

The Emperor Of All Maladies - A Biography of Cancer

By Siddhartha Mukherjee