Community Corner
Nonprofit Offers A "Lighthouse In The Storm of Cancer"
Volunteers and patients praise Northbrook's Cancer Wellness Center, which holds its seventh annual Stepping Up To Wellness run/walk May 22.
Nine years after being diagnosed with colorectal cancer, Peggy Bassrawi credits her good health as much to Northbrook's as she does to the doctors who treated her.
“The doctors that I saw healed my physical being. This place healed my emotional, physical, spiritual being,” said Bassrawi, who has been a school nurse at Niles West for the past 22 years. Although her doctors were sympathetic, she said, they didn’t always have the time to talk with her. And she’d never met anyone with colorectal cancer until she began coming to the center, which offers free support services to patients with cancer and their families.
“When a person is diagnosed with cancer, its almost like being hit in the face with a two-by-four,” she said. “You feel frightened and alone.”
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“I look at this place almost like a lighthouse in this cancer storm.”
Bassrawi, who lives in Wilmette, now volunteers at the Cancer Wellness Center once a week. She puts tissues, candy, tea and other supplies for the center on her credit card whenever she’s at the store. And for the past six years she and her husband, daughter and sister in law have participated in the Stepping Up to Wellness run/walk, an annual fundraiser that will be held this year on May 22.
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“I cannot imagine this place not being part of my life,” she said.
Bassrawi found out about the nonprofit, which has locations in Northbrook, Grayslake and Waukegan, when she picked up a brochure at one of the many doctor’s appointments she went to during her treatment.
Not too long after she heard about it, Bassrawi showed up at the center in Northbrook and signed up to try healing touch. Practitioners of the therapy lay their hands gently on or above their clients in order to relax them both physically and mentally.
“I was quite skeptical the first time,” said Bassrawi, who has a masters’ and registered nurse degree in addition to her certification as a school nurse.
But the experience was so powerful that she kept coming back.
“When you’re sore and in pain and nauseated, you just want something very gentle,” she said.
One of the toughest things about having cancer, said Bassrawi, was trying to help her then 20-year-old daughter cope. That was particularly upsetting, she said, given that her job as a school nurse is to help and comfort others. Fortunately, Cancer Wellness Center was there with counseling services for her daughter as well. According to Executive Director Nancy Laatsch, the center has one social worker and eight psychologists on staff, among other individuals, in addition to hundreds of volunteers.
Bassrawi was a client at the center for two years, until her treatments were over. Then she took a short break—to make the mental transition from receiving to giving care, she said—before she began taking classes to learn how to be a healing touch practitioner (classes she paid for herself). Now Bassrawi gives her patients the same treatment she once relied upon herself.
Executive Director Nancy Laatsch, who has been with the Cancer Wellness Center for the past 14 years, said that its clients and volunteers like Bassrawi who make her job worthwhile.
“It’s really an honor to get to work with the people here,” Laatsch says. “You see happiness and you see sadness. That’s life in a nutshell.”
Laatsch noted that the nonprofit is entirely supported by grants and individual gifts, so events like the walk are an important way to raise funds. But more than that, she said, it’s a way to bring community members together and to honor those individuals who have been touched by cancer.
In addition to a 5k run and walk, a 10k run and a one-mile family walk, the event in Libertyville also includes a tribute and memorial wall, for anyone participating in honor of a loved one.
“It’s a very uplifting, very positive event,” Laatsch said.
Volunteer Marla Miller, who started helping out at the Cancer Wellness Center this year, said she signed up for the walk as soon as she heard about it.
“I don’t know anyone who has not been impacted by cancer in some form,” said the Northbrook resident. “I lost my partner in crime, my best friend, to cancer many years ago, so it’s always been a very close-to-the-heart cause.”
When she retired from her job as senior human resources manager after 30 years with Kraft Foods, Miller said she was looking for something that would not only keep her busy, but that was worthy of her time.
Along with the , the Cancer Wellness Center was an obvious choice.
“I think that they do such good work,” Miller said. “There’s a lot of people that want the center to be successful because they know that they or somebody they love will need the center in the future.”
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