Navigating Your Way

Guidance for Cancer Survivors

by Lorrie Klosterman, December 27, 2006

A step-by-step guide to help you navigate your way. That descriptor, from the front of Puja Thomson’s just-released book, is broad enough to suggest it could be appropriate for anyone. And so it is. Thomson, a New Paltz resident who was born and educated in Scotland, says she wrote the book to “offer practical suggestions and guidelines to help you clarify your own process, perspectives, and choices.” We must add the detail, however, that Thomson’s book emerged from a bout with cancer. “Puja wrote the book I wished I had,” says Barbara Sarah, a fellow survivor of breast cancer a dozen years ago. Since her own recovery, Sarah has been assisting other women with cancer in myriad ways, including accompanying them to doctors appointments. In 2003, one of those women was Thomson. Sarah saw Thomson scribbling away in a notebook filled with insights and practical aids, and encouraged her to share them with others. Thomson has woven those notes together, enriched with her work and life experience as a counselor, healing facilitator, educator, minister of the Healing Light Center Church, and founder of Roots &Wings, a multifaceted healing and educational organization. After Shock: From Cancer Diagnosis to Healing is the result. The book’s main sections describe what’s worked for her in crafting a healthy, balanced life. Reach out for help from others. Design a “wellness program” from your own experience, insights, and knowledge instead of using others’ ideas of what’s best for you. Craft your challenges into a hopeful, forward-looking perspective. Adopt a simple way to organize financial records and paperwork. Thomson gracefully helps you accomplish these with aid from firsthand stories of her own and from “fellow travelers” in the journey. Help! One of Thomson’s foremost recommendations in dealing with cancer is to reach out for help. “Each person has to go their own way,” says Thomson. “Don’t feel you have to talk if someone wants you to talk, or shut up if someone doesn’t want you to talk. There’s no one right way of doing this.” Chapter after chapter empowers the reader to create an individualized support team and guides that process. “I believe that people in the Hudson Valley who are diagnosed with cancer have the most incredible network of support,” says Sarah, referring to our region’s diversity of hospital-based, community, organizational, and private supports. Sarah has herself been instrumental in growing these services. Thirteen years ago, she started the Oncology Support Program at Benedictine Hospital in Kingston, which has blossomed into a versatile, innovative support network for which she received Governor Pataki’s NY State Department of Health Award for Innovation and Research in Breast Cancer in 2005. The program benefits from the creative input of many, especially women motivated to help others because of their own experiences with cancer. A sampling of its offerings: • Nurturing Neighborhood Program: A volunteer network of cancer survivors who support newly diagnosed cancer patients. • Kids Connection and Teen Connection: Two programs designed for young people who have a family member living with cancer, offering special events, educational materials, group gatherings, and counseling options. • Cancer support groups for women, for men, for families, and some relating to specific types of cancers. • Healing Circle Improvisation: A group of cancer survivors who for ten years have traveled the state and beyond, creating improvisational pieces addressing thoughts and feelings about cancer in the hospital setting, at patients’ homes, and at conferences. • Exercise classes blending gentle stretching, T’ai chi, yoga, and movement using Smart Bells, conducted by an enthusiastic Ujjala Schwartz, a cancer survivor who invites anyone, not just cancer patients, to join her for regular exercise classes at the hospital. Note that help begins before diagnosis, too. For instance, St. Francis Hospital has a group of volunteers like Shelly DeWitt, a retired nurse from Poughkeepsie, who accompany women during the hourlong needle-localization/biopsy procedure. “I’ve had breast cancer myself and know what they are going through,” assures DeWitt. “The procedure sounds very traumatic, and it’s also traumatic because you’re anticipating that you may have cancer. So I can help distract them by talking about their family, where they live, and so on. I can also give them reassurance, help them know what to expect, what the machine is doing, and stay with them when the technician goes in and out of the room. Otherwise, they would be alone.”