Missy’s Corner: The Women In Pink

Photo Credit: Paul Falardeau

In 2008, I was honored to speak at a retreat in southern New Hampshire for breast cancer patients and survivors.

The Knowledge, Strength & Grace Retreat is the brainchild of Dr. Carolyn Kaelin, Harvard oncologist and herself a breast cancer survivor.   This amazing 3-day “camp” (literally held at a Y family camp on Lake Winnipesaukee) was free for the 200 women who attended. Many were from Boston, many had never been out of the city, to say the least of being out of state, and many had never been on a boat before.  The retreat was a combination of woman-bonding experience (featuring all things pink), oncological update (showcasing lectures by Brigham Women’s and Dana Farber’s finest physicians, on topics like alternative treatments for breast cancer), and fitness and educational breakout sessions.  This is where I came in.

Dr. Kaelin asked me to come and give two educational and one fitness sessions for the women, centered around their pelvic health and featuring many of the moves, tip and topics from our Total Control program.  By request, I ended up doing two fitness sessions after each of the educational sessions as well. And, in doing so, had the experience of my lifetime.

It’s funny. I was so nervous before I got to the retreat that, for the first time in my life, I actually had “speaker’s block” when it came to segueing from breast cancer to pelvic health.  I thought, “How could I make what I wanted to share with these ladies, all of whom who had looked at the face of the big “C word” and survived, relevant and important to them?”  Luckily, I posed that question to my husband, Kim, who is an amazing public speaker and himself an ardent “Pelvic Floor Evangelist.”

He said, “You know, at the end of all the breast cancer treatments, these women are still women – they all run the risk of having out-of-control bladders or falling uteruses from childbirth.”  When I checked into the average age of the participants (60), I realized he was absolutely right. And if they were menopausal, they stood a big risk of dealing with issues like incontinence.  A condition that, while it does not kill you, can ruin your quality of life.

I also knew that cancer treatments like radiation and chemotherapy wreck havoc on your body – even if they are targeting breast cancer.  Vomiting after radiation can cause stress incontinence.  Radiation can also cause tissues like the vagina to thin, which can lead to painful intercourse.  Chemotherapy drugs do lots of unpleasant things but for estrogen sensitive cancers, like breast and ovarian, treatments literally turn off estrogen production, which throws a woman right into early menopause and all those fantastic menopause symptoms (including vaginal dryness, urgency and even stress incontinence).

So, armed with what I knew about these women’s demographics and probable treatment side effects, I did my thing.

The first thing I set out to accomplish, in 90 minutes, was to get them excited about their pelvises again.  I did it by talking about how critical the pelvis is to their structure, their sexuality, their continence, their femininity. I shared with them the basics of pelvic anatomy, what can commonly go wrong and what they can do to immediately make a positive impact in their pelvic health and fitness.  We ended with a seated demo of the Pelvic Pyramid muscles which was a hint of the exercises in the fitness sessions that followed.

In each of the fitness sessions, these beautiful women, all so excited to be learning things that might keep them out of the bathroom every 30 minutes or help them do a fitness walk without leaking, or might help them eventually sleep through the night, all went through a mini-Total Control program in a 45-minute session.  I sent them home with their own copies of our Total Control DVD,so they could practice what they’d “learned” at home, as well as a copy of our book “You Go Girl, But Only When You Want To!”

From their immediate feedback and the emails I have received, I know they enjoyed their learning and their exercises. But here’s what I got out of the experience:

• A deep respect for the resiliency of the human spirit – particularly the spirit of women – in the face of tragedy
• A sense of wonder for how someone can go through so much in their life, yet maintain a wicked (even sick!) sense of humor
• An appreciation for the miracle of our bodies – even if beaten down by cancer, scarred by surgery, radiated or flushed with drugs – it can be beautiful, strong and vibrant on the other side of illness
• A humble gratitude for the ability to share what I knew with them; to be able to teach them a little tip that could make them smile and also change their life for the better, all at the same time

I hope to be able to go to this fantastic event another year.  I hope to work with some of the cancer research and treatment centers in Chicago to bring something like Knowledge, Strength & Grace to the Midwest.  If only we can find a location as spectacular as a wooded, island YMCA camp in a lake in southern New Hampshire!

If you are interested in attending Knowledge, Strength & Grace next year, post a comment with your email address and I will forward it along to the people in Boston.  If you are interested in attending an event like this in Chicago, let me know!

An interesting site I found in my research about sexual side effects and coping mechanisms for cancer patients is from the Mayo Clinic.

Have a wonderful week!

Yours in pelvic health,

Missy

Tags: breast cancer, cancer and pelvic floor, cancer survivors