Occupational therapist Lucy Aguirre-Kelly describes a scene familiar to her audience of breast cancer survivors: You’re in a hospital bed, clad in the standard-issue gown, weak, hooked up to monitors.
But when your family sees you, why doesn’t anyone want to touch you?
“They’re afraid of hurting you,” suggests one woman. “They’re afraid of their own mortality,” says another.
“We try to incorporate families into relaxation techniques,” Kelly-Aguirre says. “Our job is to remind them their touch is extremely powerful.”
Aguirre-Kelly and Regina McCarthy are at the New Beginnings support group at Baylor Medical-Sammons Cancer Center to talk about the healing power of touch. The 10 or so neighborhood women gathered join in some visualization exercises, ask questions and listen.
Support groups such as these, sponsored by numerous hospitals or the American Cancer Society, are one way women with breast cancer cope with the disease and its aftermath.
Increasingly, women and their advocates in the medical community are recognizing that healing doesn’t end with caring for the physical self.
“Illness separates the physical self from the spiritual being,” Aguirre-Kelly says. “We look at the person as a whole person. We look at roles a lot: mother, wife, worker, and deal with those.”
HOW SURVIVORS COPE
Neighborhood resident Susie Straus says she was sad when she received her diagnosis two days after her daughter graduated from Lake Highlands High School. But she wasn’t shocked.
Her mother died of breast cancer when Straus was 15, and she knew her family history put her at risk.
“I feel more comfortable on this side of breast cancer than the other, when I would worry about every mammogram,” Straus says. “It was not: Why me? It was” Why not me?”
Part of her sadness stemmed from the realization that her two daughters and sister now had an even greater chance of getti