LEWISTON – Kevin McKeown recalls few details of his battle with cancer, last waged when he was 5 years old.

But he remembers the pain of the needles and the cold of the radiation room. And he recalls how a simple distraction made him feel so much better.

That’s why Kevin, now 18, has worked so hard.

The novice carpenter led a team of Boy Scouts to build a house – 5 cubic feet – that is now the center of a playroom at the Maine Children’s Cancer Program in Scarborough.

For Kevin, the playroom was a haven from something he, as a toddler, called “the owies.”

“I imagine a kid going inside, pulling the curtain and being alone,” Kevin said of the sanctuary inside the sanctuary.

It’s a personal image that drove the project, which was his final step toward earning his Eagle Scout badge.

“I wanted something that was personal to me,” said Kevin, a quiet Lewiston High School senior. “I didn’t want to build a trail or fix a cemetery.”

The project first came up about a year ago, when Kevin bumped into the cancer program’s development director at a scout event. They talked and Kevin learned that the kids at the Scarborough clinic needed a hand.

That’s all he needed to hear.

Some of Kevin’s earliest memories are of his illness.

“I remember blips, really” he said. He remembers a few people and images and things such as “the yellow needles that made me really sick.”

He was only 2 years old when he was first diagnosed.

At first, he had a cold that wouldn’t go away, said his mom, Marguerite. Then he started getting weak.

“We didn’t know anybody survived,” she said. And the tests seemed to hurt him so much. “He struggled and cried so hard.”

For two years, the boy endured chemotherapy treatments and seemingly endless examinations. They thought it was over, then doctors decided he needed radiation, too, just to be sure.

“I said, ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?'” recalled Marguerite. They weren’t. The new treatments and tests lasted another year.

Since then, Kevin has been cancer-free. There may be lasting effects. Doctors have kept an eye on the health of his heart and the density of his bones.

None of the cautions kept him from being a dedicated scout.

At first, he’d planned to build a pirate ship for the playroom, but scaled back the plan as he began to learn the complexities of the project.

After consulting with his dad, friends and mentors, he decided to build the little shelter with materials and methods that might go into a real house.

It was framed and covered with Sheetrock. The exterior sported aluminum siding. The inside was covered with the same material used in many showers, allowing kids to mark up the walls with dry-erase markers.

Kevin compiled pictures, diagrams and the project’s narrative in a report to the scouts. It proved powerful enough to make him an Eagle Scout, a rank that his father, Mac, also earned as a teen.

“I don’t think Kevin realizes yet what this will mean in his life,” Mac said.

But Kevin, who took a basket of Winnie the Pooh bears to the clinic, is focused on the children.

“I could have done something easier,” he said. “But this means something.”