Eight-year-old cancerpatient- turned-chef Jack Witherspoon and heart patient and Olympic hopeful Antisha Anderson are two of the latter group. Equally heroic are those who care for patients day after day, year after year. During their decades of service to the community, pain specialist Dr. Faustino Bernadett and pediatrics nurse Marian George have helped thousands cope with sickness and move toward recovery.

Long Beach Magazine takes a look at these four medical heroes whose stories serve to inspire those who are struggling with their own health challenges and encourage those who are healthy, pain-free, and strong to count their blessings.

At 17, Antisha Anderson had a chance to go to the Olympic games but didn’t. She shrugs and says with a wide smile, “I was young.” A year later, she was diagnosed with a benign heart tumor. Then last November, while training at Cal State Dominguez Hills for Olympic trials, she blacked out and was rushed to Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, where the tumor that had been quietly growing for six years was surgically removed.

By March she had resumed her training as a heptathlete. A heptathlon consists of 100-meter hurdles, high jump, shot put, 200-meter dash, long jump, javelin throw, and 800-meter run. “I call that the all-purpose athlete,” Anderson, now 24, says proudly and yet humbly as well. “I’m all the way a track person.”

Right now, the Olympic hopeful has her sights set on the qualifying trials in Eugene, Ore., and the USA Track & Field Championships July 18-19 in Olathe, Kan.

“The tumor is gone, and I feel great,” says Anderson, the daughter of Gary Anderson, a running back and receiver for the San Diego Chargers, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the Detroit Lions from 1985 to 1993. Anderson has a can-do, don’t-give-up spirit: “A lot of people told me, ‘Oh, you’re not gonna run track anymore.’ I was like, ‘I’m getting back on the track.’ And I am back.”

When Jack Witherspoon was 2, he was diagnosed with leukemia and began 39 months of chemotherapy, after which he started kindergarten. A year later, at the beginning of first grade, he relapsed.

“When you have a relapse, the cancer comes back much stronger,” his mother, Lisa, says with a slight strain in her voice, “so the treatment has to be more aggressive and the cure rate drops significantly. When he was 2, it was hard, but he hadn’t established any friendships, he wasn’t in school, he was a baby. This time losing his hair was a big deal because he didn’t like to be different from everyone else. Then he couldn’t go to school and was isolated from his friends because his immune system was so compromised from the chemo.”

During this bout, the 7-year-old Witherspoon weathered 11 four- to fiveday hospital stays. Since he was hooked up to an IV, he was pretty much stuck in bed. “I’d get bored with the video games.” he recalls, “and I didn’t feel like reading.” He turned to the Food Network for entertainment because “the rest were babbly talk shows.”

The first cooking show he ever watched was “Rachael Ray’s Tasty Travels,” and the first thing he saw her cook was mac and cheese. Though Witherspoon still speaks fondly of this dish, his tastes have become more sophisticated. For his seventh birthday, for example, he asked for dinner at Chez Melange, a Redondo Beach restaurant that serves fiddlehead ferns, morel mushrooms, and quail.

What’s more, Witherspoon, who is now 8 and is nearing the end of his chemotherapy, moved closer to having his own cooking show when he served as co-chef at a fundraiser for the Jonathan Jacques Cancer Center at Miller’s Children’s Hospital last December. His mother had met up with Paul Hennessey, her employer more than 20 years ago and the owner of H.T. Grill in Redondo Beach. He agreed to host the event, which raised more than $36,000 from some 400 guests for the center at which Witherspoon received his treatments. The young chef helped to select the menu items and prepare and serve the five-course dinner, which included mushrooms stuffed with spinach; ravioli with wild mushrooms, sherry, and pecorino; mini quesadillas with tomatillo salsa; salad with Witherspoon’s own sun-dried tomato dressing; roast chicken with herbs de Provence; rib-eye steak with garlic mashed potatoes; and pumpkin pie with maple cream and candied ginger.

Witherspoon says he is drawn to cooking “because of the endless possibilities. If you get a crazy idea to make something, you can.”

For other kids who may be struggling with cancer, Witherspoon, flashing his Paul Newman-blue eyes, has this advice: “Believe everything is going to be fine, and it will be.” Especially if you have some good food.

When Faustino Bernadett, M.D., 54, began practicing medicine, he was an anesthesiologist, but his own back aches prompted him to specialize in pain management. “A lot of doctors think back pain’s an excuse to not work,” he says. “But having it myself is very useful in understanding my patients.”

One of those patients is John Looney, 60, who had undergone four back surgeries but was still experiencing a great deal of pain. Looney, who has been disabled for several years now, was concerned not only for himself but for his young daughter, Paige, a double amputee who requires assistance in daily living. Bernadett implanted a catheter into Looney’s spine that delivers relief directly to the nerves in the back.

“I went from not having any kind of a life to being able to function again,” Looney says. What’s more, he can now assist his 13-year-old daughter so that she, too, can function better.

“She’s such an inspirational girl,” says Bernadett, who practices out of St. Mary Medical Center. “And by helping John with his pain, we have allowed him to give back to his daughter. Rather than sit around on a beach and drink beer or watch TV, he’s able to help her because we were able to help him.

For 34 years, Marian George, 59, worked what she calls “the baby hall” at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center for newborns up to age 1-1/2. In those three and a half decades, she says she “took care of tons of kids” and genuinely seems to have cared about each one of them.

One particular case, however, stands out in her mind, a boy who at 7 months old had a testicular tumor removed. “I took care of him every day for a year,” George says. “I got to know his mom really well. It was very hard on her. She couldn’t be with him every day, so I was like his mom, making sure he got everything he needed.”

The last time she saw the boy he was 18, “still tall and skinny but doing great.” She says that “seeing that he had actually made it through and grown into a normal child, that he was thriving, was so wonderful. It’s so wonderful to see the outcome, even if it’s many years later.”

George, who retired in March, says that she is staying busy babysitting her four grandkids, but hopes to start volunteering at a hospital soon. In the pediatric ward, of course.