Transcription of Coping with Cancer #133
Male: You’re listening to the ‘Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast’ recorded at the studios of ‘Maine Magazine’ at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Download past shows and become a subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.
Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
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Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 133, ‘Coping with Cancer’, airing for the first time on Sunday, March 30th, 2014.
Today’s guests are Caroline ‘Tookie’ Bright, Youth and Family Services coordinator with The Dempsey Center, and Wendy Tardif, executive director of The Dempsey Center.
The Patrick Dempsey Center for Cancer, Hope and Healing opened its doors on March 31st, 2008. Patrick’s mother, Amanda Dempsey was his designated honoree. Since then, the staff has grown from 3 to 17 and hundreds of people have volunteered their time. The Dempsey Center now offers services such as Reiki, massage counseling, cooking classes and support groups.
More than 15,000 people from all over the world contact the center for assistance each year. Today, we speak with Tookie Bright and Wendy Tardif as we explore a subject that we also cover in the April issue of ‘Maine Magazine’, ‘Coping with Cancer’. We hope you enjoy our conversations with Tookie and Wendy.
I know that many of you are coping with cancer or have family members who are coping with cancer. We know that this conversation will be helpful. Thank you for joining us.
There is a special group of individuals in this world that really take medicine in a direction I think is important, but is also incredibly challenging. These are our social workers. I’m really glad that I have the chance to spend time with one of the social workers here in the great state of Maine. This is Caroline who’s never known as Caroline. She’s always known as Tookie, Tookie Bright, who’s the youth and family services coordinator from The Dempsey Center.
Tookie has worked in many settings as a social worker from outdoor adventure groups to substance abuse and mental health counseling. At the center, Tookie provides short-term counseling, art and play therapies for families affected by their loved one’s serious illness. I think you do a lot more than that, so thanks for coming in and talking to us today.
Caroline: Thank you so much. I’m really glad to be here.
Dr. Lisa: Tookie, we have to talk about your name, I’m sorry. You said, everybody knows you as Tookie, and it’s an unusual name. At first, you were called ‘Spooky Tookie’.
Caroline: Yes. I can’t believe this is going on the air.
Dr. Lisa: I know, but we have to talk about it because I love it. It’s a great story.
Caroline: Yes. I was born on my grandmother’s birthday. I was supposed to be a boy, at least that’s what the doctors had thought. When I came out a girl on my grandmother’s birthday, and my grandmother had been deceased since my dad was 16, it was really unique that here I was, two weeks late, popped out a girl and my parents just called me Tookie ever since. Spooky fortunately dropped off, and now I go Tookie two, Tookie number two. Two is my lucky number too.
Dr. Lisa: That’s good. It’s also good that you are so connected with your family which I know you are. You have a lot of kids in your family. You and I share this. I’m the oldest of 10. You have how many children in your family?
Caroline: I’m the oldest of six. I come from a blended family, so I’m the oldest, and then there is my brother Toby who’s right behind me, and then my parents divorced when I was three and they both got remarried and had additional children. It’s easy to think about, it’s like two from each set of parents, each combination. That’s as far as living children. I also have a brother who passed away when I was very young and so that makes him the number six or actually number seven out of all of us.
Dr. Lisa: I understand the difficulty of remembering all the numbers, because will actually ask me on a regular basis like, “Tell me about your brothers and sisters?”, and I have to count back. I have to think, “I have five of one set, and four of another”, but the family piece is so important to you and it really has become what you do for work and what you do for work with The Dempsey Center.
Caroline: Absolutely.
Dr. Lisa: You didn’t start out wanting to be a social worker when you were at the University of New England. You were following a very different path.
Caroline: Yes. I am. I went in as the oldest child, and this may be true for some other older children that they can relate to … you’re the responsible one, you’ve got a plan, you’re following a path, and I had entered into … At the University of New England, I had been pursuing the doctorate of physical therapy program.
The track that I was on was medical biology. I was like, “Okay. Since Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman isn’t a profession that I can go into, the next best thing would be like physical therapy because you’re working with people and their bodies, and you can get a sense of who they are and have develop relationships.”
Then, my junior year, I was in neuroscience. I was in an accelerated class with all of these brilliant pre-med students, and I just floundered. I was terrible and I was seeing a counselor at the time. I was like, “What am I doing? I am terrible at memory, I’m terrible at neuroscience, I hate neuroscience.” She was like, “What are you naturally good at?” I was like, “I don’t even have to think about my psyche classes. My psyche classes, I don’t even study for it. I just go to them and it just clicks. It’s natural.”
I get my respite from my psyche classes, and then I spend hours and hours of time studying for neuroscience or OChem which I despise. She’s like, “Why don’t you just do what you’re good at?” I was like, “My dad always told me that you have to work. You have to work to be successful in life,” and so I clearly have to work really hard in this med bio track.
That’s what I need to do in order to be successful. She’s like, “Have you even considered the idea that maybe there might be a special calling to you in the psychology world?” I’m like, “Everybody is easy at psychology, and that’s easy stuff for everyone.” She said, “No, not really. That’s unique for you.”
When I walked away from that, it was an opportunity to go in on a whole new direction and open doors for me that I’d never considered before. That senior year of my undergraduate, I transitioned to psychology and managed to do an entire major in one year. I graduated with a major in psychology and a minor in med bio.
Dr. Lisa: Your advisor was right, that it’s not a calling that everybody has. It’s not something that most people choose to pursue, and you yourself were in a different social work setting before you came to The Dempsey Center, in a setting that you told me you got burnt out on.
Caroline: Oh yeah. Yes. When I had graduated from my undergrad, I went into community mental health, and I’d spent a year at Sweetser doing work with children in a group home setting. I only spent six months there initially, and it was the hardest six months of my life.
It wasn’t so much because of the kids, it was the bureaucracy of just the system of mental health that we have. I moved from that to then case management with an organization here in Portland working with a very low socioeconomic population, substance abuse, mental health, and working with a lot of parents that were mandated by the state to receive counseling.
This is very opposite of social work. Social work philosophy is about self-determination, listening to the needs of people and responding to them as the experts of their own care, and then helping them to figure out what they need to do to put things in place. At this place where people were being mandated into care, it wasn’t them that had the problem. They didn’t want the help, they didn’t want the assistance, so there was a lot of clash there between the principles of helping and how that played out for the families and the clients I worked with, and it didn’t feel good to be stuck in the middle like that, and I got burnt out pretty quickly. That’s when I ran off to the mountain to be a ski bum, and figure out my next move.
Dr. Lisa: Then eventually led you into this place which even though most people would consider very challenging, you seem to be thriving.
Caroline: Yes. I got really lucky. I went to the University of New England for my graduate degree as well. There was a lot of opportunity there, great professors to support me, colleagues … I ended up doing my first year field placement at a hospice organization up in Lewiston, and I was at the hospice house. That experience was incredible for me.
It opened up another world that I hadn’t really explored. I was really cautious, nervous about going into hospice as a field placement, and my advisor at the time said, “Your options are limited. You can either do case management or you could take this hospice positions open, and then there’s a few other ones.” I was like, “Okay. One, I’ve redone case management in my professional … in my graduate school training. I don’t want to do something I’ve already done. I need to be exploring and pushing my limits.”
I really wanted to go into eating disorders, because I had some friends that struggled with that in college and I found it really fascinating, and there were no opportunities to do that. When this hospice was at an opportunity, I was like, “That’s really scary. That means that I’m going to have to deal with pieces of my own mortality, that I don’t know if I’m really capable of doing yet or I don’t want to look at, and what is this going to mean for me?”
I ended up going to see a counselor the summer before my internship and I said, “Okay. All right. Let’s talk about death.” She’s like, “Okay. Let’s do it.” I’m like, “All right. Yes. I’m going to have to die alone.” She’s like, “Yes you are.” I was like, “So, I’m anxious about that.” She’s like, “Yes. Let’s talk about it a little bit more,” and we dove into further.
It was just being able to bridge that conversation that really opened up the possibilities of actually looking at that, confronting it, and being able to sit with that as being validated that it’s normal and it’s okay to feel anxious about those things. When I did my first day at my internship in hospice, I called my dad sobbing on my way home. He was like, “It’s terrible. It triggered you. What happened?”
I said, “No, no, dad. You don’t understand. It’s so enlightening.” I didn’t realize that there’s so much living that takes place at the end of life. I am just remembering this. It’s making my heart flatter with the passion that I felt that day of like, “This is where I need to live. This is where I need to be, and this is …”
I love this. This is like life times 10 thousand. It’s concentrated and people are real, and there’s no distractions because it’s a matter of time to be saying the things that they need to say or doing these things that they need to do, looking back and taking inventory of their life and experience. Gosh, how needy to be sitting with somebody in such an authentic place. Really powerful.
Dr. Lisa: Here on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, we’ve long recognized the link between health and wealth. Here to speak more on the topic is Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
Tom: How do you recognize cancer? Cancer growth has no boundaries and it crowds out the productive purpose of life. What does financial cancer look like? Here are a few thoughts. Spending that grows into debt, saving that ends up as hording, investing that leads to speculating, and even giving that ends up as sacrificial martyrdom.
I’m grateful for and in awe of the people in the world who dedicate their lives to fighting the disease of cancer and helping people who are impacted by it cope with it. But I’m also in awe of the people that manage to go through life, spending the right amount, saving the right amount, investing the right amount so that they can have enough to give.
That process is what we call ‘Evolve with your money’. Get in touch with us at ‘[email protected]’.
Male: Security is offered through LPL FInancial, member of FINRA SIPC, investment advice offered through Flagship Harbor Advisors, a registered investment advisor. Flagship Harbor Advisors and Shepard Financial are separate entities from LPL Financial.
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Dr. Lisa: You deal with a group that really is either as closed or as open as they come.
Caroline: Yes. Yes. Yes, teenagers. Yes. Absolutely. I am. I also had come from … I worked as a director at a girl’s camp before I got into some of this mental health stuff. I always loved working with kids, but I had thought that I wasn’t going to be able to work with kids in the way that I wanted to.
Back in those years, when I was a case manager, working with people involved in the system because it just seem too complicated to get through the family dynamics. When I found my way to The Dempsey Center, it was like this huge opportunity opened up.
I remember sitting with Kerry Irish who is our psycho-social coordinator, and at that time, she was our executive director, and I had met her for the first time. She’s like, “You would be perfect to start our children’s program. I’ve been wanting to get something going.” I’m like, “That’s so generous of you.” She was like, “I wasn’t going to take a student this year, but that you would really be perfect.” I’m going, “If you want to think about it, why don’t you sleep on it and if you still want me to come next year, send me a message or something and I would love to do it. This would be amazing.”
She goes … Ten minutes after I leave, I got a text message from her saying, “I’m really serious. I still want you. I don’t need to sleep on it.” It would just like naturally happen from there, and began to be able to work with youth and families that have been impacted by cancer. Those teenagers are my favorite population.
I didn’t realize that I’d ever find that niche as amazing as it is. They are an incredibly powerful population to work with. They also don’t get the credit that they deserve. In the field of oncology, there is still very limited data to support the needs of teenagers impacted by cancer. There’s very limited resources out nationwide that are providing services to teenagers in a way that is meaningful to them. I think that’s the nuance right there that really is making a different at The Dempsey Center.
We have an incredible funding base to be able to provide support services that are geared towards our clients, and so we can really listen to what they’re asking for and provide it without having to cut corners or do half the service, like, “Okay. We are hearing from teens that they need an activity to be distracted by,’ but they also need support, real support, not just like fake support, like, “We’re here for you”, and “Here, have an ice cream sundae, because we’re here for you and we’re supporting you,” but we don’t want to overdo it.
Teenagers aren’t going to be the ones to say, “I want counseling.” They’re not going to be the ones to say, “I want a support group.” They’re going to be the ones to say, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know what I need.” You probably hear that a lot if you have teenagers, right “I don’t know.”
Where you do get the feedback from them is by experimenting and finding out what works. That’s what we’ve been doing a lot of, is experimenting, trying a program, asking kids what they’re wanting, doing that and then weaving in at really appropriate clinical interventions. I call this my ‘Mary Poppins philosophy of a spoonful of sugar’. You dress is up and you make it fun, but you provide a true service. Don’t serve them soda, serve them juice.
Dr. Lisa: I think that philosophy could actually be carried over into adults. I mean, don’t we all want to do something fun that ultimately benefits us in some way?
Caroline: Absolutely. I completely agree. I think that in one way, we, as adults, we’ve felt like we have to be a really critical society because as consumers of our healthcare including mental health, we have to be diligent to make sure that what we’re getting is evidence-based and really a true service and yada, yada yada which all has its purpose, but we don’t need to necessarily be marketing that.
We don’t necessarily need to be dressing up our programs with psychobabble or medical terminology that says, “We know how great we are and we know what we’re doing.” As long as we have the evidence to be able to deliver that when people are asking for it, that’s what’s most important, and that the interventions that are being provided are truly evidence-based and it’s not simply just thrown out there on a whim, then the actual service itself can be fun. It can be engaging, it can be distracting, it can be invigorating, it doesn’t have to be humdrum, white wall interventions, come and sit in my office, and let me probe you with questions. There’s lots of different ways to be creative with our application of intervention.
Dr. Lisa: You also deal with a group that hasn’t gotten as … another group that hasn’t gotten as much I guess attention, and that’s the young adult group, the group that maybe they had cancer when they were younger and they’re growing older and they’re cancer survivors or maybe they have been impacted by a family member who had cancer when they were growing up. That’s a really important group because young adults and older adults, it’s not the same.
Caroline: Yes. Again, there’s a little bit of a disconnect between what the needs of those populations are. The young adult population in particular, they’re much more similar to the adolescent population in that there’s a high sensitivity to stigma developmentally around the ages of 18 to 22, let’s say 23. People are really developing that autonomy, figuring out who they are, and as an autonomous individual, you got to be able to experiment with meeting your own needs, solving your problems.
You hear a lot of people even adults saying, “I can handle it on my own.” When maybe they could benefit from some support from a professional of whatever it is that they’re needing support from, whether it’s a mental health provider or it’s a doctor, or a physical therapist, “I’m fine. I’ll handle it on my own.”
There’s also stigma around the ideas of what it means to receive assistance of help from somebody else that’s trained in a particular area, as if to get help or receive help denotes your autonomy, denotes your ability to care for yourself as a mature human being. Being sensitive and aware of that need to be autonomous, to be able to care for yourself is really meeting that population where they are. In order to do that and say, “Hey, listen, we get it. You can care for yourself. Absolutely,” and there’s a huge strength in being able to lean on people that also understand what you’re going through.
Having friends that get it is something that maybe even a professional can’t provide, but a professional can certainly set up the environment and the safety in order to make that happen. That’s what I do. I don’t really look at myself as I’m the one providing necessarily the intervention. I’m simply providing the space and the structure, the framework in order for the intervention to naturally, organically unfold, whether it’s with the adolescence in the teen group, or it’s with the young adults in the group not on my own which is we call ‘NOMO’.
The unique thing with the young adult population is that we don’t meet in The Dempsey Center. We may in the future, but right now, we meet at a restaurant across the street. Our support group doesn’t look typical. The young adults then can come out, they can grab a beer, they can get a glass of wine and we sit around a table and we talk, so it feels a lot less maybe threatening or a lot less like that stigma of what a counseling or support group looks like.
Dr. Lisa: Tookie, you’re a gem.
Caroline: Thank you.
Dr. Lisa: I think anybody who’s listening can hear that in our conversation. Again, the work that people … social work is so important. I think it’s completely under recognized but it’s especially important in the population you’re dealing with. I appreciate it. I appreciate what you do.
Caroline: It’s interesting, while I was waiting to come in here, I was on my little iPhone browsing on the Facebook news feed. There was one of those ads like, “Get your MSW today and help people.” I noticed that there was a thread of comments of like 64 comments and I’m browsing through them and there was so much rhetoric and misconceptions about what social workers do.
It was like “DHS, DHS, DHS.” It’s true. There’s a stigma that that’s all that social workers are is a representation of DHS, but we’re not. We do so much more and it really is. I understand that people have a limited understanding because we don’t do a very good job as social workers communicating what we do.
Clearly, I’m a social worker in a unique setting, but there’s lots of other oncology social workers out there. There’s amazing social workers in private practice, in administration. The hospital President at CMMC is a social worker. They’re all over the place not just DHS. Thank you for bringing that up.
Dr. Lisa: I encourage people to find out more about the field of social work. I know the University of New England does have a great program, so people who are listening, if you’re interested, you can Google that program. I hope the people who have been impacted by cancer specifically children, adolescents, young adults take the time to go to The Dempsey Center website and perhaps connect with you.
We’ve been speaking with Tookie Bright who is the youth and family services coordinator with The Dempsey Center. Thank you for all that you do.
Caroline: Thank you so much, Dr. Lisa. It’s been great.
Dr. Lisa: As a physician and a small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
Marci: I hope you take a moment to consider the health of your business, and how you can make certain it continues to thrive. Now is the perfect time for a business check up. it’s a perfect time to reflect on the systems and processes you had in place last year to determine what worked and what didn’t run as smoothly as it should have.
Write down the specific changes you’d like to implement to tighten things up over the next month, three months, six months or a year. Give yourself realistic tasks and goals. This introspection and planning will go a long way toward making certain that 2014 is a year of great success.
I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need, ‘Boothmaine.com’.
Male: This segment of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is brought to you by the following generous sponsors, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage in Yarmouth, Maine, honesty and Integrity can take you home. With RE/MAX Heritage, it’s your move. Learn more at ‘RHeritage.com’.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is brought to you by Banger Savings Bank. Fr over 150 years, Bangor Savings has believed of the innate ability of the people of Maine to achieve their goals and dreams. Whether it’s personal finance, business banking, or wealth management assistance you’re looking for, at Bangor Savings Bank, you matter more. For more information, visit ‘www.Bangor.com’.
Dr. Lisa: Not so long ago, I took a trip up to Lewiston to visit The Dempsey Center which has become really a beacon of light and hope for cancer patients and their families around the state of Maine and really around the country. Today, I’m quite pleased to have with me Wendy Tardif who is the executive director at The Dempsey Center coming and have a conversation about the work that they’re doing with patients and families.
Wendy has worked in the field of community health education for over 25 years, and as a certified tobacco treatment specialist, her efforts focused in lung health. She helped hundreds of former tobacco users in Central Maine quit, she co-founded ‘Healthy Androscoggin’, is a commissioner for the ‘Maine Lung Association’ and is a faculty member for the ‘Center for Tobacco Independence’.
I think that’s … I’m intrigued by the fact that you have worked on cancer from both ends now. You’re now the executive director of The Dempsey Center, and you’re still very passionate about smoking cessation. Thanks for coming in and talking to us today.
Wendy: You’re welcome. I’m glad to be here, Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: Wendy, you’ve been doing public health for a long time, and I think this is something that many people don’t really understand: the field of public health. And you’re doing it from two different directions now. You’ve done public health from a tobacco smoking cessation standpoint, and now you’re doing public health and really a care giving, bringing health and hope to cancer patients.
What caused you to be interested in public health in the beginning?
Wendy: I guess I’ve always been interested in helping people increase the quality of their life, and that’s really where it comes from I guess. Right out of college, I was in the wellness world mostly doing exercise and physical fitness kinds of things, but back then, which was like the early ’80s, it was a huge interest in the public wanting to quit smoking but not knowing how to do it.
I can just remember getting a lot of phone calls at that time and it’s like, “Wow. We really need to help these people. They need help,” and I really didn’t know a lot about it except that I had a mom that was a smoker all her life, and so I’ve been around it and could see how difficult it was for her to quit. I just started learning more about it and really became quite passionate about tobacco particularly both in terms of preventing kids from ever starting to use tobacco as well as helping adults that had become smokers already to quit.
One of the things I think too that really spoke to me quite deeply was the fact that 90% of adults that smoke started when they were kids. I just remember learning that fact and it really hasn’t changed a whole lot since that time either. Just thinking about that was like, “Wow. We really need to do something to prevent these kids from ever starting,” so really, working on the policy side too, which of course is a big part of public health as well.
My journey has just led me to The Dempsey Center for various twist and turns and it’s really interesting to be working on it from this side too, and I can’t help but bring that little piece of prevention into The Dempsey Center as well, because yes, we’re helping cancer patients again, trying to keep their quality of life as high as we possibly can during this very difficult time for folks which I think is just so important, but at the same time wanting to make sure that we get the message out there about not that we can prevent all cancers, obviously we can’t, but what are some of the thing that we can do to minimize our chances of actually being diagnosed with cancer.
It’s been kind of interesting pulling in a few pieces of that prevention world into The Dempsey Center since I came onboard three years ago.
Dr. Lisa: You’re from Maine originally?
Wendy: I am, yes. Yes. Grew up in Maine and went to school in Maine. I actually went to school in New Hampshire for a little bit and I came back to Maine and met my husband here. He was pretty grounded in his professional life and just stayed on. I’m very passionate about collaborations and working together for the greater good and I think because I’m from here and I really grew up in the Lewiston Auburn here and I still live there, raised my three boys there. It’s kept me really grounded in the community and wanting to just make it a better place for folks.
Dr. Lisa: I was struck when I went to The Dempsey Center by how really connected to the community, like even physically the center was. The center does draw people from all over the state and fields calls from really all over the country and from what I understand even all over the world. But it has a very Lewiston flavor to it. It’s housed in a former shoe factory I believe?
Wendy: That’s right.
Dr. Lisa: It looks out over the basilica and the Androscoggin and Central Maine Medical Center. There’s no denying its roots.
Wendy: That’s one of the reasons we chose this space. Central Maine Medical Center had purchased the building, oh boy, probably close to over 15 years ago now I think and has slowly renovated each of the floors, so when we were looking for new space and the top floor of that building was available, it became our first choice wanting to move our services and programs right into that space.
I think it creates a very comfortable, warm environment with the wood and the brick, and I think folks feel really at home with the big windows and all the light coming in. It’s been a really neat transition for our organization going from the space we had prior to this and into this new space where we can hold all of our programs as well as provide all of our services right in one spot.
Dr. Lisa: The Dempsey Center also in addition to being a center, it also hosts The Dempsey Challenge which is a multiday event that takes place in the fall. I believe you have dates for 2014 already.
Wendy: Yes, we do. September 27th and 28.
Dr. Lisa: Then also, so you have the community that’s created by these walls of the center, but then there’s also this bigger community that all gathers which is, it’s fascinating because these are … many people aren’t necessarily bikers, these are not people who would have run before, maybe wouldn’t have even walked before, but people are so … they come together such a cohesive group in support of this cause.
Wendy: Absolutely. It’s interesting because folks come together for lots of different reasons. I think what it provides is it provides the opportunity for people to come together for whatever their reason, whether it’s that they’re in supportive family member or friend that’s going through a cancer diagnosis or they’ve lost somebody to cancer, and they’re doing it as really a therapeutic opportunity to gather their friends and family.
It’s really amazing and one of the … We just had a woman, one of our participants who’s been with The Dempsey Challenge for I think all five years, and at least four of the five, but she came to the center last week to share a photo book with us that she put together in memory of her husband who passed away in 2013 from cancer, but they actually were doing The Dempsey Challenge before he was ever diagnosed, and then he did get diagnosed.
Anyway, she came into the center and she was just sharing how important The Dempsey Challenge is from that perspective. It’s an opportunity once a year for her family and friends to gather together in this really positive way in memory of their friend and family member that passed away. It’s a time to laugh and a time to cry, and it’s just amazing what it provides for folks, and even from a personal wellness perspective too, you hear people that are setting The Dempsey Challenge as a goal, they want to do the 25 or the 50 or 100, and what it means to them even from that perspective.
There’s just a lot of reasons why folks do participate in the challenge. I just feel fortunate that we’re able to be the ones to be organizing this event and be able to pull communities together and people together, and make it really what a special event it is.
Dr. Lisa: One of the reasons that The Dempsey Challenge is important is that The Dempsey Center provides services free of charge to anyone who has ever been impacted by cancer which is something that I was very surprised to hear about because it’s not just a cancer patient, it’s not just a cancer patient’s wife, it’s the children, it’s someone’s aunt … It’s really anyone who’s ever had that connection which could be just about anybody.
Wendy: Anybody, yes. Yes, you’re right about that, and it does … To be able to say to participants that are raising money for The Dempsey Challenge that 100% of the money that they raise goes directly to benefit cancer patients. It doesn’t go to the expenses for the challenge. We raise our money through sponsorships for that, and I think that really means so much to people. It really makes it worthwhile for them to reach out and dig deep and try to do whatever they can to help raise those funds because we do provide a really in-depth opportunity for anybody impacted by cancer as you say, whether it’s through programs or massage therapy for folks that are going through their cancer journey right now.
I mean, just a myriad of services that we offer, one among counseling with social workers and as you mentioned, the youth and family services aspect of our program is a pretty special component as well. It is, The Dempsey Challenge is our primary fundraiser and really how we raise our money to be able to offer those services at no cost to anybody.
Dr. Lisa: The goal of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is to help make connections between the health of the individuals and the health of the community. The goal of Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes is to deepen our appreciation for the natural world.
Here to speak with us today is Ted Carter.
Ted: From time to time, I get calls from people I know or former clients and they let me know on what’s going on around them. One lady called recently about a letter written in 1956 to Kenneth Roberts and it talked about a woman who wanted some dowsing done. Kenneth Roberts did a lot of work with Henry Gross and she knew that I did dowsing.
She remembers when I went out to dowse her property, this woman that called me. She said, “The end of the dowsing rod flew off” at the time I was doing the dowsing work. A lot of times, I do work on land and detect subtle energies and a lot of times, things show up on the land that verteces and things of that nature that really speak to the properties of that land through the subtle energies.
It’s amazing how intuitive we are in nature and how nature speaks to us in very subtle ways. Ashes on properties are easily detected, pets and people ashes, I’ve time and time again detected where people are buried. For instance, some people always amazed at saying, “That’s the place where my husband was buried.” I’d say, “We should honor this place.” She says, “I did. I planted this tree here.” I said, “We can have another little ceremony or something.”
It’s always important to realize that there’s much more that’s going on beyond the scenes and behind the scenes that we can’t see on this, on your landscape in your land.
I’m Ted Carter. If you’d like to contact me, I can be reached at ‘Tedcarterdesign.com’.
Dr. Lisa: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast understands the importance of the health of the body, mind and spirit. Here, to talk about the health of the body is Jim Greatorex of Premiere Sports Health a division of Black Bear Medical.
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Dr. Lisa: I know that you have massage, you mentioned massage. You also have Reiki. You have individual, one-on-one rooms for Reiki.
Wendy: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: You have a very large kitchen and you have cooking classes to help people learn about healthy or healthier eating.
Wendy: Yes, we do. We do. We offer a program called ‘Nutrition for Life’ which is four sessions. We offer that six times a year. The topics for that program change periodically, but for the most part, it’s about learning how to cook in a more healthful way.
For a lot of folks, it’s about introducing them to things that they’re not quite sure what it would taste like, quinoa for instance, or not quite sure how to cook it. Our registered dieticians/cook for our program will share recipes and show people how to cook foods that they might not have ever prepared before, so that they then can go home and feel comfortable preparing it themselves.
It’s been one of our most popular programs for sure. That one is available to cancer survivors and caregivers, and we also prevention classes around nutrition that are available to anybody in the community. If they don’t identify themselves as somebody’s who’s been impacted by cancer, they can still take advantage of some of our programs that we have at the center.
Another one is ‘Environmental Health’. We’ll educate folks about the different kinds of chemicals and things that we use for cleaning for instance or even personal hygiene products and what some of the things that you want to look for and so forth. We’re really trying to make our programs very up-to-date and appropriate using the best practice and the best information we have from research out there in the community.
Dr. Lisa: The one that you just described the program, you just described is one that’s particularly important to me and in part because I’ve been to various cancer events as a guest and noticed that things … they’ll be giveaways of personal products. I’m shocked at the types of things that we’re giving to cancer patients, former cancer patients, cancer survivors and people who have never had cancer, but that are containing things like deodorant or beauty products that are containing things that we know are really not good for our delicate systems and maybe aren’t good for anybody’s systems.
It’s interesting to me that you would offer that type of programming for people because it’s not something that everybody thinks about.
Wendy: Right. Yes. I guess that’s probably true. We’ve tried to incorporate as you’re describing what … You’ve seen, I’m like, “Wow. Have we given away anything like that?” It’s something you do want to think about though that in terms of the system’s approach to how we do things not only educating people about what you want to look for in certain products, but also making sure that we’re not promoting them on some other level, which is really important.
I guess our thinking on all that is we know that people are interested in learning more about that, so we want to make sure that we bring those kinds of programs to The Dempsey Center so that folks can take advantage of them.
One of the things that we hope to do in the future is to do more with our website, where we videotape those kinds of programs and put it on our website so that folks that aren’t able to get into The Dempsey Center, whether it’s because they’re compromised because of their current chemotherapy treatment or whether it’s because they live in California, we want to be able to have or give them access to some of those programs to work where our hope is to develop a video library as well on our website.
Dr. Lisa: You also offer yoga which I know for some people is … even though we hear about yoga everywhere, a lot of people who try yoga at The Dempsey Center aren’t people who necessarily would be going to a class out in the community.
Wendy: Yes, that’s very true. Again, it’s one of our most popular programs. I think there’s part of the reason for folks trying it is that we have a great referral network, kind of through The Dempsey Center itself, but also with providers both in terms of the community and even outside the community that are referring cancer patients and their caregivers to that program, but it’s also instructed by Tish, one of our employees who is also … She does a very gentle yoga, she really is able to listen to the needs of the clients are in our class, and teach accordingly.
I think that’s a big part of it as well, that people don’t come in and feel like totally overwhelmed, that the level is so high that they can’t begin to learn how to do yoga. We have a huge following for that class. That’s one of the classes that’s going to have to expand pretty quickly here I think.
Dr. Lisa: Also, as a physician for the Central Maine Healthcare Group, I get all the information that comes through on The Dempsey Center, and I’m often struck by how comprehensive it is and how healthful it is, and how I would love to see this type of information like you have a couple of integrative medicine physicians who come in and are giving talks. I’d love to see this information pushed out into the community further, before people need it because they are impacted by cancer.
Do you feel like you are in some ways setting the stage for that?
Wendy: We have another portion of what we do at The Dempsey Center as we have an outreach educator really. What her role is is to go out into the community, businesses and other organizations and help in terms of cancer education and risk reduction. Again, that’s like the beginning stages really trying to get into the organizations and it’s not just about prevention I guess, because we do do screenings and things like that. She’ll organize like a oral health screening or a skin cancer screenings where we’ll pick up some problems and people will be detected … their cancer would be detected real early.
I think in terms of working with maybe some of the public health districts now that we actually have public health districts more than just two of them in the state of Maine, I think that part really is an area where it’s helping us to reach beyond our doors I think.
Dr. Lisa: In writing the article for ‘Maine Magazine’ about The Dempsey Center, I spent time talking with Mary Dempsey and with Patrick Dempsey, and understanding the family reasons for wanting to have the center in place, the fact that their mother had been diagnosed with cancer and the type of cancer that was … I’ll use the word ‘Recalcitrant’ and recurrent. It just keeps coming back. Just keeps coming back.
It’s interesting because I have the sense that there is this, with the recurrence of the cancer, there’s always been a sense of hope, and it’s a sense of hope that’s carried over into the center itself that you can … whatever you’re given, you just show up, you engage, there’s always some reason to be present. That must be an interesting challenge sometimes because not everybody gets cured.
Wendy: Yes. Yes, you’re right about that, Lisa. I think we have an amazing staff there. I just … It’s just like it’s so heartwarming just even thinking about it. Our really amazing staff and I think it takes a toll because you have folks that are able to overcome their cancer at least for the present and you have some folks that are end of life or advanced stage.
We learned so much from these folks that come through our doors, and one is we get letters all the time. One of the things that is just really evident I think is that there is always that hope and that healing that’s part of the work that we do on a daily basis, and it’s what the clients that are coming through our doors are teaching us about too. It’s pretty amazing just on a daily basis really what we all experience.
The other thing that I think is really helpful for our own staff is the fact we have three licensed clinical social workers on our staff. They are just really amazing folks too in terms of helping our staff through these more difficult times. Yes, it’s really an interesting process. Some of us that, I mean like my job, I don’t have a lot of direct patient care or contact even, but I try to get out and meet as many of the families and individuals that are coming through our doors.
We just learn so much from them about living life to its fullest extent for whatever time we have left. They’ve been the best teachers I think, really the best teachers.
Dr. Lisa: It’s an interesting contrast with where we are I think in healthcare today, the sense that here you are dealing with a population that has a lot of uncertainty associated with it, and yet you’re able to keep showing up and talking with the social workers and taking care of each other and taking care of yourselves as individuals. In healthcare, we actually have some successes. We actually have some good things that are happening.
I think we need to find a way to look at models like yours that maybe are based on end of life, and bring them to before the end of life. Does that make sense?
Wendy: Yes, it does. It absolutely does. I wonder if there are some models out there in relation to that. Yes, I’m not sure what that would look like exactly, but I think you’re right. I mean, healthcare is taking … it’s so different now. I mean, we’re trying to keep people out of the hospitals any way we possibly can.
I think a lot of the things that we’re doing are actually helping to do that, even at the stage that folks are at when they come through our doors, helping with symptom management and working as a team to not just The Dempsey Center, but the larger cancer treatment team even to prevent cancer patients from ending up in the hospital.
What I’m seeing in the healthcare world is being a lot more proactive I guess with patients that are experiencing certain symptoms to help them with those symptoms now, not waiting until they’re actually hospitalized to do something about it when they’re at a much higher degree or need of much higher degree of care at that point.
It’s interesting what you’re suggesting there too, especially where I think about it from your perspective and the patients that you’re seeing, the spectrum of patients you’re seeing I’m sure, real healthy to very sick and how can we be proactive and not reactive especially with the sicker patients that we see. It’s really interesting.
Dr. Lisa: We’ll have to keep having that conversation. We’ll have you back on another show when we talk about the future.
Wendy: I think so. Yes, there we go.
Dr. Lisa: Wendy, how do people find out about The Dempsey Center?
Wendy: They can go to our website which is ‘Dempseycenter.org’. They can come and visit us any time. We try to do open houses a few times a year, so folks can feel comfortable just walking through our doors. Although that’s available any time, we are open from eight in the morning to 7:30 in the evening from Monday to Thursday, and then Friday, we close at 4:30. Folks can come through our doors, we’ll give people tours, explain the services that we have, they can also call us at 795-8250 and set up a time to come in and have a one-on-one consultation with a cancer resource specialist too. That’s an option.
I guess those are the two best ways for folks to find out about us.
Dr. Lisa: I appreciate your taking time out of your very busy schedule to come down and talk with us today. We’ve been speaking with Wendy Tardif who’s the executive director at The Dempsey Center, and also a faculty member at The Center for Tobacco Independence and a commissioner for the Maine Lung Association. Thanks so much for all the work that you’re doing to bring health to the people of Maine and for talking with us today.
Wendy: Thanks for having me, Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 133, ‘Coping with Cancer’. Our guests have included Tookie Bright and Wendy Tardif. For more information our guests and extended interviews, visit ‘Doctorlisa.org’.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes for a preview of each week’s show. Sign up for our E-newsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter and Instagram and read my take on health and wellbeing on the bountiful blog.
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This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you’ve enjoyed our ‘Coping with Cancer’ show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Male: The ‘Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast’ is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors; ‘Maine Magazine’, Marci Booth of Booth Maine, Apothecary by Design, Premiere Sports Health a division of Black Bear Medical, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage, Ted Carter, Inspired Landscapes, Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial, Dream Kitchen Studios, Harding Lee Smith of the Rooms, and Bangor Savings Bank.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded in the studio of ‘Maine Magazine’ at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas, Susan Grisanti and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Our assistant producer is Leanne Ouimet. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our online producer is Kelly Clinton.
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