C ANCER JOURNEY
Resilience and realistic hope for women with breast cancer – I’m a person with a life, not a patient with a prognosis Catherine Zollman Fellow in Integrative Medicine (University of Arizona); Medical Director, Penny Brohn UK; Macmillan GP, Bristol
‘Is there anything I can do to help myself ?’ is a question that women diagnosed with breast cancer frequently ask their hospital teams, but the answers can sometimes be confusing and disempowering. At Penny Brohn UK, we treat all our clients as people, rather than as ‘cancer patients’ and we use an individualised, whole person approach to help people increase their wellbeing, support their bodies’ innate ability to repair and restore itself, and build overall resilience in a time of crisis. The results can sometimes be profound.
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I first became interested in holistic approaches to health as a medical student lucky enough to join the BHMA in its early days. I trained initially in medical oncology and immediately saw the potential of an approach that combined lifestyle support, conventional treatment and complementary therapies, even though the term integrative oncology hadn’t yet been invented. I now work as medical director at Penny Brohn UK, one of the leading charitable providers of integrative support for people with cancer, while maintaining my NHS GP work and my role as a Macmillan GP with a special interest in cancer with the Bristol Clinical Commissioning Group.
It’s Monday morning. We are sitting in a spacious room with a bay window looking out over the beautifully tended gardens of Penny Brohn UK’s national centre on the outskirts of Bristol. I’m in the weekly treatment support clinic with a group of people, all affected by cancer in some way. Asha is new to the group and sitting slightly apart. She wears a colourful scarf around her head. She is half way through a course of chemotherapy for primary breast cancer, which will be followed by surgery and then radiotherapy. She’s been told that she will be eligible for breast reconstruction and that she’ll be on hormone therapy for at least five years. If all goes well, one year after her radiotherapy is finished, she’s been told that she’ll be discharged to follow-up by her GP as part of her low-risk stratified pathway, but that the hospital team will be there if she has any concerns. Diana has triple negative breast cancer, which was treated with curative intent three years ago, but two weeks ago, at a routine follow-up scan, was found to have spread with two small lesions in her lungs and one
in her liver. She is still waiting to hear what treatment is being proposed but is bracing for another round of chemotherapy. She looks strained but determined. Next to her, her husband Oliver looks nervous and subdued. Joan comes in late with news that her latest tests show that the third line chemotherapy she’s been having as part of a trial for widespread metastatic breast cancer in her bones and lungs has not worked and that she’s being taken off the trial. To look at her, you wouldn’t know she had cancer – attractively dressed, suntanned from being in the garden, even the usual sparkle in her eye as she greets the others warmly and sits down. All three women have been diagnosed with breast cancer, but all are now facing very different challenges. Each brings a very different set of resources and attributes which could either help or hinder them, yet they all want to feel that they have some control over what the future will bring – the alternative means helplessness, hopelessness and maybe despair.
© Journal of holistic healthcare
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Volume 14 Issue 2 Summer 2017
