EDWARDSBURG — Ronald McDonald Family Room at South Bend Memorial Hospital has been a lifeline for the Boyer family of Edwardsburg.

Who better to feature at the 2011 McDazzle than 2010 Edwardsburg High School graduate Matthew Jaymes-Lee Boyer, the second of Tammy and Tim Boyer’s four children.

Mom chairs the Miss Edwardsburg pageant coming up Dec. 3, her son was 2009 king.

Matthew, a Bethel College sophomore engineering student who turned 20 Oct. 5, became the first patient to address the fundraiser for 400, which raised at least $115,000, according to preliminary totals.

Seventeen men, including television personalities, sported kilts for several weeks, seeking support to insure Family Room services can continue to be provided at no cost.

Thirty is the average number of parents, grandparents and siblings who walk through the front door daily seeking an oasis with comforts of home — coffee, a shower, meals, snacks or simple solitude from hospital stress.

“It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever been part of,” Tammy said Oct. 25 of McDazzle.

She has spent so much time in the medical community people ask her whether she considered becoming a nurse. She finished a business degree from Bethel in 2009   with a 3.71 grade-point average.

Raised by her parents, Jack, a former Cass County commissioner, and Marian Teter, to believe there is no such thing as a disability unless you allow it, it has been passed on from the mother with cerebral palsy to her son that his digestive tract disease is no crutch and need not define him.

For 15 years the goal that drove him was graduating with his classmates because they had been kind to him, not mean, when he had to attend school with tubes in his nose.

He met that goal with an ambulance escort to commencement chronicled by television news.

The next mountain he scaled was acceptance into Bethel and living in a dorm on campus. Though he suffered some spring setbacks, he caught up during a “relatively good summer” and began his sophomore year on schedule in August.

Two decades have passed since Matthew went from Memorial Hospital to Riley Children’s Hospital for that first stay in Indianapolis with a condition so rare the medical community studied him.

He was a “tester patient” for Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., at 4 years old.

His family bunked at the newly-opened Ronald McDonald House.

Matthew’s large bowel shut down and had to be removed after several surgery attempts failed to save it.

An ileostomy bag from the small bowel was placed and taken down when it failed to function in 1996 and 1997, but not before he played youth soccer.

With Matthew fighting one bowel obstruction after another, his family felt grateful when Memorial Hospital opened its Ronald McDonald Room because they could “stay local” for more of his care since he was in critical condition most of the time, making leaving the hospital next to impossible.

Kellie Montgomery of Edwardsburg and room volunteers were “tremendously helpful” in seeing Matthew realize his graduation dream. He returned to the hospital within four hours to be reconnected to the tubes that sustain his fluid levels before departing the following day for Mayo Clinic for another surgery.After 16 years of science, they know what is wrong with Matthew’s digestive tract, but as of yet, there is no known cure.

Tammy mentors devastated parents beginning a medical journey she embarked on a lifetime ago.

“We almost lost Matthew nine times over the years,” she said, amidst numerous stays both at Memorial Hospital and Mayo Clinic.“Each time, we have been blessed to have the Ronald McDonald Room to embrace us as we faced very difficult medical challenges.”

Thank you for your emotional and financial support over the years. Without them, we would not have been able to be there for our son.”