In August, Cancer Patients Will Have Something to Laugh About

What do Emily Litella, Roseanne Roseannadanna and the Wellness Community have in common?

All were made famous by the late comic genius Gilda Radner, of course, but that’s not the only thing they share. At the Wellness Community, a support organization for cancer patients and their families, laughter is important, just as it was with Radner’s classic work on “Saturday Night Live.”

That’s right: cancer and laughter, both in the same sentence.

Helping people with cancer laugh in the face of their illness is an important part of what happens at the Wellness Community, says Vicki Goldish, executive director of the organization’s new Orange County center.

Although the center’s grand opening won’t be until September, Goldish and administrative coordinator Marilyn Toohey are already at work, and the first support groups will begin meeting Aug. 1.

Radner, who died of ovarian cancer, was a participant at the original Wellness Community in Santa Monica, and she told of her experiences there both in her autobiographical book, “It’s Always Something,” and in interviews with Life magazine and others.

“I wish there were a thousand more of them,” she wrote in the book. “There is nothing woo-woo or mystical or weird about the Wellness Community. The concept is simple and honest. I often said . . . that it reminded me of the early days of ‘Saturday Night Live’ when we had our innocence and we believed in making comedy and making each other laugh.”

Now Radner’s wish is beginning to come true. In addition to Santa Monica and Orange County, centers are now open in San Diego, the South Bay area, and Knoxville, Tenn., with other centers scheduled to open in Boston, Baltimore/Annapolis, Md., Cincinnati, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, Ventura and Pasadena.

The Orange County center is also a dream come true for County Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder. She first learned about the Wellness Community through her sister, Estelle Ullman, who died of pancreatic cancer five years ago. “She was a participant at the original center in Santa Monica, and I saw how important it was to her and how much it helped,” Wieder says. “I realized that Orange County was a wasteland when it came to meeting this need, and I made a commitment in her memory to get a center here. It was such a sad commentary that in a community of over 2 million people, when your oncologist told you about the program, you had to run all the way up to Santa Monica or Redondo Beach to participate.”

Wieder organized the business community and others to raise the quarter-million dollars necessary to get the center open. “Until you’ve traveled that road, you can’t realize how important a vacuum this program fills, not only for the patient but for the family,” she says.

All the centers will follow the philosophy of the original Wellness Center, founded in 1982 by Harold H. Benjamin, Ph.D., a Beverly Hills attorney and author of the book “From Victim to Victor.” Services are provided “absolutely free,” Goldish says. “Participants are never approached for funds. Never.

“Our goal is to help as many cancer patients as possible recover to the greatest extent possible,” Goldish says. “This is not a place for people to come and die, and we don’t offer you a cure. The premise of the Wellness community is that you can participate in your own recovery. You don’t have to be passive.”

Each Wellness Community, Goldish says, is just that, “a community where new friendships are formed, where participants can share with other people who are facing similar problems and build support groups. We want people to learn whatever they need to know to participate in their fight for recovery along with their physicians, to become victors as opposed to victims.”

In addition to support group meetings, the center will offer lectures and presentations on such topics as stress management, nutrition, pain control, relaxation techniques and exercise.

“Essentially, the Wellness Community’s services keep people focused on living instead of the deterioration often associated with the disease or the treatment of the disease,” says Dr. Curtis Booraem, a psychologist at the UCI Cancer Center.

“This is not a conflict with medical treatment or anything else,” Booraem says. “It’s a tremendous asset, something that we dreadfully need. We have patients who have been waiting a year or more for the doors to open. So many people want to participate that there could be people standing in line waiting to get in.”

Dr. Steven Armentrout, who heads both the oncology department at UCI Medical Center and the Orange County Wellness Community advisory board, is a strong believer in that philosophy.

“One of the hardest and most depressing areas of cancer is that the patient suddenly feels control has been withdrawn. The doctor is making decisions, the family is making decisions, and the patient isn’t. It’s a terrifying, depressing thing to happen,” Armentrout says. “But most of the time now, oncologists recognize that the patient is a mandatory participant in decision making.

“In the past 10 years, there has been an increasing appreciation on the part of oncologists of the role that the patient’s feelings about the disease and their fight against cancer plays in their ultimate well-being and in fact, in many cases, their recovery.

“There is no question, even in those patients in whom a cure is not achieved, that the quality of life is far, far better with the kinds of attitudes the Wellness Community and similar support groups can provide.”

Research indicates that there is a link between a person’s attitude and the body’s immune response, Armentrout says, but doctors don’t yet understand how it works or how to manipulate it.

To help participants laugh at the disease, the Wellness Community developed a regular joke fest. “You come in and bring your dumb jokes, and you all laugh together and get your endorphins going,” says Toohey, who is fighting her own battle with cancer, as is Goldish.

But humor is hardly confined to those occasions, Toohey says. “Everybody, when they walk into the room, you know they’re there for the same reason. You can say things to them that you can’t say to your own family, about how awful you feel, how you hate losing your hair and you’re tired of throwing up. I remember when I was sitting in on one group (in Santa Monica), and an older woman was telling the story about how she found out she had cancer and the first thing she did was get in a car and drive up to Palos Verdes to look for a cliff to drive off.

“Another woman, who was fighting a brain tumor, said, ‘Let me know what cliff you found. I may join you.’

Then her husband said, ‘If you do that, please take your own car.’ ”

In addition to the laughter, Goldish says, “we try to help people know how to talk with their doctors in an informed way, and know that they are not isolated. A lot of other people are going through the same thing.”

For information on support groups or other Wellness Community services, call (714) 258-1210. The center is in Santa Ana at 1924 E. Glenwood Place.

Jan Hofmann is a regular contributor to Orange County View.