Lively Room Brings Joy to Cancer Ward

Past the doors of the dying in a brightly colored room in the cancer ward, people smile, music plays and the sun shines in.

“It is a happy area,” said Sandra Yates, the unit’s head nurse. “You don’t see people walking by with long faces like you might at a funeral home. Family members are not afraid to come to the hospital. They might not look forward to it, but to me that sets it off.

“If they aren’t afraid to be here then we are doing our job.”

Welcome to the Lively Room, where The Three Stooges, W. C. Fields and the kids from Our Gang do their stuff on a 54-inch TV screen, and there are a player piano, tapes of old radio shows and scrapbooks of cartoons.

Since DeKalb Medical Center opened the Lively Room in 1982, it has been the scene of countless parties, recitals and at least one wedding.

“It helps, it really does,” said Rachel Blackstone of suburban Atlanta, who spends all of each day in the ward with her terminally ill mother. “That hospital room gets mighty small after a while.

“It eases the mental strain. Sometimes I go from here down to the second floor to look at the new babies. The room maintains an upbeat feeling.”

The idea that emotions effect health isn’t new. In the 1400s, surgeon Henri de Mondeville told his patients jokes, thinking the levity would speed recovery. The concept has won more credence, but even in the 1960s, Yates said, more than 80% of emotion studies centered on the negative.

“Positive emotions were thought to have no purpose. Now we’re making inroads in positive emotions,” she said, adding that they have been shown to produce enzyme and hormone changes that help people cope.

Board member W. W. “Walsh” Lively donated $15,000 to start the room, which was inspired by former Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins. He checked out of a hospital and into a hotel with an armload of “Candid Camera” reruns, and credited belly laughs and Vitamin C for helping him to beat a debilitating illness.

“We have seen patients who thought they would never go out of here but they did make it out, they did go home again even if it was only for a short period of time,” Yates said. “It is a good, sound medical practice with positive results.”

Nonetheless, “we have to make sure it is therapeutic for the patients and doesn’t make things worse for them.”

The stress of most cancer wards, she said, usually causes a high turnover among nurses; at DeKalb it is the lowest in the hospital. The junior nurse on the day shift, for example, has been there five years.

“No matter what the condition, we see people as living individuals with needs. If we keep that in perspective it is all very normal to us,” Yates said. “Many people are alert to the very end and when they accept their disease and the outcome, they say they are ready to go . . . We tell them, ‘It’s not time yet. Let’s make today the best it can be.’ ”

It’s important, she said, to respond immediately to any opportunity. “We had a woman who had taught dance and she said she really wished she could teach one more class. We couldn’t do the class but we got a ballet tape she could critique, so she could have some input.”

“A 77-year-old patient said she couldn’t understand why she was still here but if she was still going to be here she wanted her hair colored one more time. Yesterday we colored her hair. Today she asked that her nails be polished.

“These things may not seem important but they give hope and that’s what it’s all about. You can talk about hope until you’re blue in the face but you have to give something meaningful.

“If someone wants a picnic, set the date for tomorrow. You can’t put things off. Especially here.”