Party For A Sick Friend Slab Inn Raises Money Toward Marrow Transplant For Leukemia Patient

It’s 3 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and The Slab Inn is hopping.

The dusty parking lot is packed. The folks inside are dancing and laughing. The raffle tickets are selling like hotcakes and the mock jail - where you can pay to put your best friend “behind bars” - is quickly filling up.

That’s because the 100 or so people gathered at this Post Falls watering hole know Jamie Stebbins’ best chance for survival costs more money than he’s got.

Leukemia is an expensive illness.

Good thing the 22-year-old Coeur d’Alene man has a lot of friends and a pull-together community backing him up.

Folks piled into The Slab Inn for a fundraiser to help Stebbins find a badly needed bone marrow donor.

North Idaho businesses donated more than 60 items for a silent auction. People paid anywhere from $1 to $25 to lock up their friends in the jail. The inmates - dressed in black-and-white striped outfits - had to match that money to get out.

“It’s neat to see how far people are willing to extend their arms,” Stebbins said from his hospital bed 15 miles away.

Stebbins, who graduated from Post Falls High School, was first diagnosed with leukemia in March 1991. Intense chemotherapy put the disease in remission.

He thought he beat the blood cancer for good until last May, when doctors informed him leukemia had struck again.

Now the soft-spoken man who enjoys boating, fishing and collecting baseball cards is back in chemotherapy at Kootenai Medical Center. The treatment has thinned his hair and nearly wiped out his immune system. An infection and 102-degree fever put him back in the hospital Friday.

Wrapped in a robe and pajamas, he looked thin and pale but still smiled and joked and didn’t complain. On Sunday, he was happy because he didn’t feel nauseous.

“He’s a sweetheart, an absolute sweetheart,” said Karen Mingus, a Slab Inn employee bartender who helped organize the fund-raiser.

Back when Stebbins had more energy, The Slab Inn was a favorite place of his to dance and hang out with friends.

“A lot of us here didn’t know he was ill because he wasn’t one to talk about it,” Mingus said. “He’s very stoic about the whole thing.”

But when they did find out, it was full-speed ahead with plans to help.

New bone marrow is Stebbins’ only real chance for a cure. But finding a matching donor isn’t easy - or cheap.

The in-depth testing required to find a donor will cost at least a couple thousand dollars and could grow depending on how hard it is to find a match, said his mother, Judy Stebbins. Their insurance will not cover those costs and there is no telling how long it will take to find the donor.

“It’s kind of a hurry-up-and-wait kind of game,” Stebbins said with a resigned smile.

But by 5 p.m. Sunday things were looking good at The Slab Inn, where friends had raised almost $2,000.

Lynn Fitzgerald wore a button with the young man’s picture on it as she sold raffle tickets. The Post Falls woman remembers shaving off Stebbins’ hair for him when it began falling out the first time he was diagnosed with leukemia.

“I went out into the parking lot and started to cry, because I have a son who is two years younger,” she said.

A few months later, Fitzgerald would be shaving her own son’s head - when he developed brain cancer.

“I’ll always feel like Jamie was God’s way of preparing me for what was to come in my own life,” she said. “Nothing - nothing was going to stop me from helping here.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 color photos

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: DONATIONS Anyone wanting to help Stebbins can make donations to the Jamie Stebbins benefit fund at the U.S. Bank branch in Post Falls.