Drive Launched to Open Center That Treats Cancer With Hope

What do you call a cancer patient who keeps producing cancer cells?

A lymphomaniac.

With off-color humor like that and other think-positive techniques, cancer victims at the Wellness Community find the inner strength to live life fully. Sometimes, they even beat their disease.

It is a concept so full of hope that cancer patients have flocked to the first Wellness Community, opened in 1982 in Santa Monica, and a second version in Redondo Beach. Now, with a third one being planned in Orange County, a San Diego group has launched a drive that could well establish another branch of the program here.

“I really have the feeling that we’ll be open here within six months,” the founder of the program, Harold H. Benjamin, said Monday in San Diego.

Armed with a ready smile and a collection of anecdotes, Benjamin came to town to lend moral support to the first formal action, a Monday night board meeting, by a group that has met informally since October to plan a Wellness Community for San Diego.

Fighting for Recovery

The San Diego program would be based on Benjamin’s main message to cancer patients, which he repeats across the country:

“If you participate in your fight for recovery along with your health-care team, instead of acting as a hopeless, helpless, passive victim of the illness, you will improve the quality of your life and just may enhance the possibility of your recovery.”

The San Diego group dreams of a 3,000- to 4,000-square-foot, homelike space where adults with cancer could go free of charge to learn how to join the battle against their disease. The program emphasizes support-group meetings, nutrition, demystification of the disease and directed visualization--a technique in which patients imagine their immune systems fighting off the cancer.

Already, the local group’s phone number (294-HOPE) receives a couple of calls a week from San Diegans who would attend a Wellness Community here, said Beverly Fremont, a psychotherapist who is one of the organizers. A few of them drive to Santa Monica or Redondo Beach to participate in the program there, she said.

So far, the local group has a board of directors, an advisory board of physicians and psychotherapy specialists, and an auxiliary of volunteers who will staff fund-raising events and other activities.

Less than $1,000 has been raised so far, and foundations and private donors will be asked to donate the remainder needed to launch the program, Fremont said.

“We would like at least $150,000 before we can open our doors, because we need to know that we can be there” permanently for cancer patients, she said. Annual operating costs of serving 150 patients a week are expected to be about $200,000 a year, said Benjamin, who does not draw a salary.

What the organizers lack in money they make up for in determination, which for some comes from having battled cancer or having watched a loved one do so.

Burton Disner, a San Diego real estate broker and organizer, had called Benjamin last year about bringing his wife to the Wellness Community during her treatment for lung cancer last year. She was too weak to make the weekly trips, though.

“She passed away in September. And the day after she passed away, I received a letter from Beverly, saying my name had been given to her by Harold as someone interested in a Wellness Community,” Disner said. “My immediate thought was I wasn’t interested. It was going to be tough enough as it was.

“But it was either that night or the next night that Johnny Carson had one of those monologues where you just can’t stop laughing. And I thought to myself, ‘We did not have enough laughter. We didn’t have the humor, the positive ideas going through her illness.’ And I said, you know, there should be a Wellness Community here if I can do anything about it. And that’s how I got involved.”

Benjamin, a retired lawyer, emphasizes that his program doesn’t offer a sure cure for cancer. Neither does it want to replace conventional cancer treatments. Instead, it is an adjunct that can increase the chances that chemotherapy and other treatments will work.