I founded Hurdle Jumpers
after completing a year of treatments for breast cancer.
 Although
they try, health care professionals cannot completely prepare a
patient for all the possible side effects of treatment. I received
many good tips, but I also discovered a lot on my own.
I'm a management consultant with JRH
Consulting Group, a firm I founded in 1985. Professionally,
as a Certified Public Accountant with more than twenty-years of
experience in public accounting and private industry, I've solved
lots of problems. I always say “my clients are happy to see me go.”
And here's the only similarity between my cancer treatment experience
and my business consulting projects: there's a beginning, a middle,
and an end.
 I
began my career at ArthurAndersen, and gained extensive financial
management experience as controller of two middle market companies.
I've consulted in both the profit and non-profit sectors. As a trained
accountant, I did the math:
One Hurdle Jumpers kit + the loving support of
family, friends, health care professionals and donor companies =
a patient with the strength, products and comfort items to soar
over the obstacles of cancer treatment.
I relied on my formidable business problem solving skills in approaching
the generous donor companies.  I
identified the items belonging in the first Hurdle Jumpers kits
by looking around my home. I used various products to manage the
anticipated as well as unexpected side effects of treatment. It
was so important to me the kits be provided free of charge to any
cancer patient or caregiver. One by one I contacted nationally recognized
companies. I think the responses from the pharmaceutical and health
& beauty industries are extraordinary. They quickly and generously
chipped in with sample size donations. My second bedroom was stacked
with boxes, but when pallets of generous donations started to arrive,
we moved into a climate-controlled storage facility. That's where
our volunteers organize the donations so we can assemble our kits.
I am elated and reassured in knowing the Hurdle Jumpers kits will
make life easier for patients who have their heads and hands full,
dealing with the difficulties involved in moving from feeling shocked,
fearful, physically sick, and/or exhausted to relieved, comforted,
and eventually well again. It's a club I never wanted to join. My
mother died from breast cancer when I was eleven years old. I was
stunned when I found a lump. I decided to make lemon meringue pie
with the lemons of a cancer diagnosis.
- Janet Halbert, Founder & Cancer Survivor |
