The Emotions of Cancer
By: Kris Kerlin, Director of Mission Impact
When someone is facing cancer we know that it’s not just their body that is affected. Cancer is a whole person experience and a relational experience that affects everyone that loves the person with cancer. It affects thoughts, feelings, behaviors, relationships, daily activities, sense of meaning and purpose, life force, spirit.
Emotional support is providing care for the whole person. recognizing that cancer changes everything and creating a space for people to grapple with those changes. CanCare is a safe zone for emotions and a place where you can be as you are – mad, sad, glad, afraid or any other emotion.
You can be in transition, you can have a good day, a bad day or just a day. There are not too many places that we can focus on the emotional part of ourselves and fewer where we can learn about emotions, how to identify them, express them and manage them.
Emotional support looks like listening with the heart, hearing the feelings underneath the words and extending non-judgmental empathy. As we celebrate Mental Health Awareness Month this May, allow yourself to attend to the emotional part of yourself. Reach out for support, express your feelings, share them with someone who will listen and wants to understand, a CanCare volunteer. Give support, attend to feelings in yourself and others, be kind and empathetic, make yourself a safe place for someone else.
Quote: Henri Nouwen – Listening as Spiritual Hospitality
"Listening is much more than allowing another to talk while waiting for a chance to respond. Listening is paying full attention to others and welcoming them into our very beings.
The beauty of listening is that those who are listened to start feeling accepted, start taking their words more seriously and discovering their own true selves.
Listening is a form of spiritual hospitality by which you invite strangers to become friends, to get to know their inner selves more fully, and even to dare to be silent with you."
Click HERE for a handout on Dealing with Emotions.
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Volunteer Highlight
By: Daniella Martinez, Client & Volunteer Relations Specialist
This month we are highlighting a wonderful volunteer that always goes above and beyond to make sure his clients get what they need. Antony Alvarado is a two-time brain cancer survivor from the age of 9.
He grew up and still lives in Wilmington, CA in the southern region of Los Angeles. Antony is currently beginning his senior year of his undergraduate education at the University of Rochester, in Rochester, NY.
At his university, he studies biochemistry and studio art photography. He is also preparing to apply and enter medical school in the fall of 2023. This is what he had to say about his cancer journey: “My cancer journey at first felt as if my life had been derailed, but over the years I have realized my track was just shifted a bit (or maybe a lot). Eleven years later, and counting, I am a survivor who finds purpose in gardening, photography, and an aspiring career as a physician scientist who will be there to help cancer patients in my efforts as a patient mentor, physician in clinic, and scientist in the laboratory”.
Antony was a part of the very first CanCare Virtual training, class 100th. Antony shares that during the start of the COVID pandemic and having abruptly moved back home from college, he felt locked in his space. He wanted to have an outlet of connection with others while also minimizing risk of contracting COVID-19. One day as he did some searching on the internet for cancer volunteer programs, he came across CanCare and reached out to us to see if training was available virtually. Two months later he graduated from training.
Thank you, Antony, for all that you do. We can’t wait to call you Dr. Alvarado!
