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You Have Cancer:

Now What?

By LeeAnn Atwood, Senior Director, Development and Marketing

Wellness Place, Cancer Education and Support

“You have cancer.” Hearing these words can cause shock, fear, denial, grief-or a combination of all. This is the beginning of the roller coaster ride that is the cancer experience. What comes next?

Those recently diagnosed with cancer seek the help of professionals at Wellness Place in Palatine, to find a path through their many emotions; to evaluate treatment options; manage side effects; and to formulate questions for healthcare providers. Most often a combination of individual and family counseling, integrative therapies and peer support are essential for cancer survivors, their loved ones and caregivers to maintain quality of life throughout the cancer journey. Through generous donations and grants, Wellness Place services are able to be offered at no charge which is vital during a time when treatment related expenses can be overwhelming.

Understanding the urgent needs of the newly diagnosed population, Wellness Place clinical specialists became certified to present the ACS educational program, “I Can Cope,” within their core menu of services. The program outlines cancer-related medical terms, treatments, side effects and how to manage them, and provides tips for communicating with doctors and family.

When Cancer is in Your Family

A cancer diagnosis has a profound impact on the individual as well as each family member. Questions emerge such as: Why me? What now? Is there support for my spouse and children?

Tailored for couples, individual adults, teens and children, one-on-one cancer-related counseling helps survivors manage stress and find effective ways to communicate with family members and healthcare providers.

Parents living with cancer face a unique set of challenges. To address their needs, we added Parenting through Cancer consultations to our menu of services. These discussions include common concerns related to talking with children about cancer and balancing home, hospital and sibling issues.

For parents who have lost a child to cancer, we created a Parent Bereavement Group. Facilitated support, guidance, and counseling are critical when dealing with grief of this magnitude. Each has lost a child in the recent past and is at a different stage of grief, some only a few months while others a year along the way. They reach out to each other while searching inward-in attempts to make sense of their child ’s death, heal their broken hearts and forge ahead on the long road before them.

The Parent Bereavement Group has made us realize how vital services of this kind are to families experiencing cancer and in response, have initiated a Bereavement Support Group specifically for adults dealing with the death of a loved one from cancer. For information about this group contact Kathy Scortino, Wellness Place grief specialist at 847.241.5977.

Art therapy is offered as a component of individual counseling, with the hire of a board certified art therapist who is also a child and adolescent life specialist. Art therapy provides an opportunity to express thoughts, emotions, desires, and anxieties related to diagnosis and treatment.

We all know people affected by cancer. Do they know about Wellness Place?

“Unfortunately the message about our services doesn’t always get to those newly diagnosed in their time of greatest need. It isn’t unusual to hear “I wish I had known about Wellness Place when I was first diagnosed,” said Pam Reiss, Executive Director. “The best gift you could give to someone experiencing cancer might be a referral to call for information and support. ”

Counseling and cancer information specialists, healthcare professionals, volunteers, and staff-work together at Wellness Place-providing vital support and information that often becomes a life-line for cancer survivors and their families.

Wellness Place, cancer education and support is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization located in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. For more information visit WellnessPlace.org or call 847-221-2400.

Mind Games Keep You Sharp,

But A Variety Of Fun Is Needed

By Alvaro Fernandez

Do crossword puzzles and bridge provide all the brain exercise you need?

This is a question we often get asked in our classes and lectures. The quick answer is that while recreational activities like crossword puzzles, sudoku, bridge, chess, poker, etc. are all good for you and better than doing nothing, they are usually limited in their range of mental cross-training as well as difficult to control to ensure the right combination of both challenge and novelty.

If you do them often, what you’re doing is fun and can’t hurt. But it may not be complete. Recent recommendations made by a panel of experts reviewing a poll by the American Society on Aging stated “A single activity, no matter how challenging, is not sufficient to sustain the kind of mental acuity that virtually everyone can achieve. ”

Using your brain to solve creative challenges is excellent practice and will help slow down the effects of aging. The limitation with your current brain workout program is that it does not have enough variety or novelty to work out all your mental muscles. Have you ever seen the guys in the gym with the buff upper bodies supported by little chicken legs? The same thing can happen in your brain. Just as you cross-train in your physical fitness routine (mixing cardio with strength training and flexibility) to get a balanced workout, you need to cross-train your mental fitness to exercise your brain through motor coordination, emotional understanding, memory, focus and attention, sensory processes, communication, language skills, and mental visualization.

Furthermore, how can you gauge your improvement if you don’t have a way to measure it? Using computer software to give you a baseline score, workout routines for your brain, and follow up tests gives you a measure of your improvement. So basically, right now you may be doing a highly focused workout using language and memory but with inconsistent challenge and limited feedback. A structured program should give you assessment, novelty, and performance-based challenge while still being fun. That extra mental stimulation can increase the rate of neurogenesis, or the creation of new neurons and the connections between neurons.

A randomized controlled double-blind study published in August 2006 “demonstrates that intensive, plasticity-engaging training can result in an enhancement of cognitive function in normal mature adults. ” Challenging cognitive function leads to learning and neurogenesis. So keep doing crosswords and sudoku, especially if you enjoy them, but don ’t neglect the rest of your brain!

Conclusion: Do activities you enjoy, but be sure to do things that challenge you with new and different types of stimulation.

Alvaro Fernandez is the CEO and Co-Founder of SharpBrains.com, which combines the latest science-based information for Brain Training with fun Brain Teasers, and has been recognized by Scientific American Mind, MarketWatch, Forbes, and more. Alvaro holds MA in Education and MBA from Stanford University, and teaches The Science of Brain Health at UC-Berkeley Lifelong Learning Institute. You can learn more at http://www.sharpbrains.com

Socializing For Summer Fun

Aids Memory and Mental Health

By Martin Mak

Senior citizens who keep busy with family, friends and volunteer work do better in memory tests, a new study has suggested. This means that senior citizens or anyone of any age should socialize to strengthen and keep their memory.

Does it make sense to be more involved and have a more active social life as we age? Yes it does. Being more engaged socially appears to delay memory loss as we grow older, a new study has shown.

The finding, which appears in the July issue of The American Journal of Public Health, suggests that strong social interaction, through friends, family and community groups can enhance our brain health as we age and that social isolation may be an important risk factor for cognitive decline for old folks.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health used data gathered from 1998 to 2004 from the Health And Retirement Study, a large, nationally representative population of American adults aged 50 and older.

In the study, participants took memory tests at two-year intervals during the period. Testers read a list of 10 common nouns to survey respondents who were then asked to recall as many words as possible immediately. They did so again after a five-minute delay. The researchers also measured social integration based on marital status, volunteer activities and contact with parents, children and neighbors.

When the results were analyzed, it showed that people in their 50s and 60s who were involved in a lot of social activity also had the slowest rate of memory decline. In fact, compared to those who were the least socially active, study subjects who had the highest social integration scores had less than half the rate of memory loss. The researches looked at age, gender, race and health.

It was interesting that those who had the least number of years of formal education appeared to have he most to gain from an active social life as they aged. The study showed hat the protective effect of social integration was greatest among individuals with fewer than 12 years of education.

“The working hypothesis is that social engagement is what makes you mentally engaged, ” said Dr Lisa F Berkman, the study’s lead researcher and director of the Harvard Center For Population And Development Studies.

“You can’t sit and withdraw if you’re constantly talking and working on things and figuring out problems in your daily life. It’s not just completing a crossword puzzle, it’s living your life.”

Hopefully, the results will change the mindset of those who are put in a position to care for an elderly family member. There are many people who erroneously believe that just being there to give moral support to an aged person is enough. But people need to understand that aged people need to be more socially engaged to reap the rewards of good mental health. Old folks need to be encouraged to get involved more socially and engaged at a level that is meaningful both for the individual and the group or community they are involved in.

Such involvement by aged people in a community or group can reap similar memory benefits as engaging in a memory training or using memory techniques to enhance learning and memory skills. It is also definitely more meaningful and has an added side effects - contentment, greater self-esteem, optimism and overall greater self-confidence.

“A lot of people, when they think about the elderly, focus on social support ... things like what can I do for my elderly mother, ” Dr Berkman said, “But having someone to count on is not what we’re measuring. It’s not about support it’s about being completely engaged and participating in our society.”

What was notable about he study is that participants didn’t have to be married to or surrounded by extensive family to receive the protective effect of social engagement.

“You don’t have to have friends if you have family. If you don’t have family but you have friends, that’s good. If you volunteer to civic organizations that can be a substitute,” Dr Berkman said.

“People don’t have to have all of these things. They just have to have some breadth and diversity in the kinds of networks and ties they have in a community. ”

Martin Mak has developed a new program to help people enhance their memory and learning experience. Find out how with his free and popular ecourse at www.mightymemory.com