A Wellspring of Hope and Comfort

The Wellness Community helps cancer patients help themselves

Byline: By Ryan Kearney
STAFF WRITER
"Newton Tab", Wednesday June 5, 2002

Every day is a challenge for Don Detenber. He can't walk far because his heart speeds up and his breath shortens. Though he can drive, he can't lift much; unloading groceries takes hours as opposed to minutes - each item, one at a time.

Detenber has multiple myeloma - "a bone-eating cancer," as he calls it.
Simply put, the plasma cells in his bone marrow grow too quickly, killing the bone around them.

"It's done a job on me," says Detenber, 67. Since July, 2000, when he was diagnosed, he's suffered from five compression fractures in his spine. "With this disease, the fractures don't heal, so I'm in constant pain." He went through chemotherapy and 11 rounds of radiation and takes "tons of medication," which tingles and numbs his extremities. He also turned to Eastern medicine, most notably acupuncture and Quigong, an ancient Chinese relaxation technique. But a year ago he realized he needed emotional assistance as well.

That's when he discovered The Wellness Community of Greater Boston,
located in Newton Centre. One of more than 20 Wellness Communities around the country, the non-profit center provides support, education and exercise for cancer victims and their families, all of it free of charge.

"I think it's a wonderful resource," said Detenber, a Westboro resident. "The facilities that they have here are very therapeutic." He pointed to the "spacious, comfortable environment" of the 9-year-old center, which is on the third floor of the office building at 1320 Centre St. It's easy to see why many have found a home at The Wellness Community. On opposite sides of the narrow central office are large, carpeted rooms with cushy couches. The walls are adorned with paintings and photographs, and there's even a kitchen and a television.

"`Homey' is important to us," said Bobbie Flynn, community outreach
coordinator at the center. It's important that the center be inviting, she said, "rather than a clinic atmosphere." But the services offered by The Wellness Community are what keep Detenber and roughly 300 others per month coming back. 

"I just find it very beneficial to come here and talk about my life,
because people without cancer don't really know what we're going through," he said. "Sometimes it's very depressing - it isn't always uplifting. But I think it's necessary."

Cancer victims who come to the center are called "participants," says
Flynn, because the center insist they participate in their treatment,
rather than being passive patients. "We deal very much with the emotional aspects of cancer," she said.

The center holds seven weekly support groups for participants and another two groups for family members of participants. There are also monthly groups for kids and teens who have a parent with cancer.

In addition to support groups, the center offers classes on meditation,
stretching, Tai Chi and yoga. Then there are workshops on radiation
therapy, lymphedema, message therapy and nutrition, to name a few topics, as well as networking sessions for participants based on their type of cancer, age, or stage of recovery.

It's a busy place, and thanks to countless donors, all of it is free.
"Nobody pays anything for anything they do here," said Waban resident Dr. Harriet Berman, program director at the center since December. "Money is not a part of the equation.

On June 10, they'll be holding the 9th Annual Gilda Radner Award Dinner, their annual spring fundraiser, at The Westin Copley Place in Boston. This year's honoree is Michael Lipof, former Newton Alderman and member of the center's Board of Directors. He died of cancer last November at the age of 62.

Radner, a Saturday Night Live comedian who died of ovarian cancer in 1989, participated in a Wellness Community in California. As she neared death, Radner asked her friend Pamela Katz to start a Wellness Community in the Boston area, where Katz lived. Katz helped open the Newton Centre location four years later.

Now women like Lynn Langmuir, who is recovering from breast cancer, have a place to congregate, to share stories and gain insight into each other's struggles.

"[The Wellness Community] is the one place that I feel absolutely,
unrestrainedly comfortable talking about what I need to talk about," said Langmuir, a 51-year-old Brookline resident. "There's my own personal thing I need to talk about, and I can do that here, and that's powerful."

Diagnosed in December of 2000, Langmuir says she approached her condition pragmatically. But after undergoing surgery, she found it hard to recover alone. She first came to the center in March 2001 and has been returningever since.

What makes The Wellness Community special, she said, is that it's more
than "just a system of support groups." "It is a community," she stressed. "The staff here is great. I feel like I'm known here."

Another participant, Jean, who withheld her last name, was diagnosed with breast cancer in July 2000. After undergoing chemotherapy and radiation, she says, doctors convinced her the cancer was gone, but she was diagnosed with recurrent breast cancer in January.

"I kind of had a feeling that the cancer wasn't all removed the first
time," she said. "I feel like if I had been coming here [from the start], I would have been more insistent." Doctors don't necessarily respect a patient's instinct, but people at The Wellness Community do, she said.

The support groups are often heavy, including people talking about how
they're going to die, said Jean, a 51-year-old Wellesley resident. "It's a shocking thing to hear, especially when it's coming from someone you've come to like," she said. But it's not always like this. "We actually spend a lot of time laughing," she said. 

This range of emotion is what the center is all about, says Berman, a
breast cancer survivor. She was a group facilitator before becoming the
center's program director. She pointed out a newspaper obituary sitting on her desk for a participant, but also said that there's a bright side. One day last week, a participant came into the center after being absent for some time. She had just recovered from surgery and, on this particular day, learned that she was free of cancer.

Employees at the center told her how much they missed her and how glad
they were she was all clear. "She said, `Geez, you people are like my family,'" recalled Berman. "And I said to her, `We are.'"

The 9th Annual Gilda Radner Award Dinner is scheduled for Monday, June 10 at the Westin Copley Place Boston. For information about the dinner, call KMC Productions at 617-698-6616. For information about TWC programs, call 617-332-1919.