AnCan and The Marsh (well renown, long-established theater company with a large following in the Bay Area and venues in San Francisco and Oakland) collaborateevery 4th Wednesday of the month for Solo Arts Heal!
On March 23rd, we had the pleasure of hosting Solo Arts Heal with special guest, Twinkle Burke!
Twinkle is an Actor/Writer from New York City. She is equally comfortable on stage and screen and writing in different genres and styles. Her work has been performed with TMI Project, The Actors Studio Playwright and Directors Workshop, Lift Every Voice: Black Women Speak Festival, and The Drawing Board to name a few. She can be seen in various independent films and on TV in various shows, including Season 3 of HBO’s SUCCESSION. She plays “Eugenia” in Colin West’s latest film, LINOLEUM premiering at the SXSW Festival in March of 2022. She is an avid proponent for using the arts to learn, heal, and grow.
In this SAH, Twinkle performed a piece telling how she used her craft of acting to sustain herself while miscarrying her child.
Watch the performance here:
To SIGN UP for any of our AnCan Virtual Support group reminders, visit our Contact Us page.
AnCan and The Marsh (well renown, long-established theater company with a large following in the Bay Area and venues in San Francisco and Oakland) collaborateevery 4th Wednesday of the month for Solo Arts Heal!
On February 23rd, we had the pleasure of hosting Solo Arts Heal with special guest, Barbara Dyskant!
Barbara is an energetic and versatile pianist, composer, singer-songwriter, and writer who strives to use her art to warmly evoke empathy with her audience and empower them to move forward in their lives, as well as to entertain and delight. She also was caregiver for both her daughter and her husband’s cancers.
Barbara’s other passions include hiking, dancing, camping, adventuring, laughter, meeting people, reading about science, preserving the environment, good conversations, and learning from everyone. And using what she learns from her experiences and those of others to improve lives.
Watch the performance here:
To SIGN UP for any of our AnCan Virtual Support group reminders, visit our Contact Us page.
AnCan’s founder, Rick Davis, innovated virtual peer-led support groups back in 2010. He recognized the potential of peer advice as the best information a patient could find. AnCan’s 2021 research confirms what Rick knew intuitively.
Neuroscientist Herb Geller PhD, the abstract’s lead author, highlighted the following key research findings,
“Our research indicates that peer-led groups don’t just improve quality of life around the things we can control like diet, exercise and stress. Eighty percent of our participants feel the groups make them better advocates for themselves, and well over 60% take information gleaned back to their healthcare teams.”
While this poster is featured in the Advanced Prostate Cancer track on Feb 17, AnCan is proud of its work to establish the stature of the low risk Active Surveillance (AS) protocol and includes its AS findings.
Co-author and nationally recognized AS Advocate, Howard Wolinsky, said:
“Sixty eight percent of our AS participants told us the Groups made them better advocates and 27% reported lower levels of anxiety – that’s a major difference. Active surveillance is the Rodney Dangerfield of prostate cancer – including our study at GU ASCO recognizes AS patients”
Rick Davis, founder of AnCan and a prostate cancer survivor, says the research demonstrates the power of patient communities on outcomes:
“I realized the power of peer-led support groups from my own treatment. Bringing them to a virtual platform 10 years before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19 and Zoom meetings, made peer support available to those compromised by geographical, physical and social issues. Recognition by GU ASCO is a big step in legitimizing AnCan’s work for all peer-led support.”
Want to make 2022 the best year of your sex life? We’ve got the webinar for you in “Cancer, Chronic Illness, and Intimacy”.
From pleasure with a partner, or just riding solo, nothing is off limits in this webinar featuring sexual medicine rockstar , Dr. Rachel Rubin.
Featuring a panel of patients Dion (lupus), Jimmy (prostate cancer), Kim (multiple sclerosis), and Michael (testicular cancer), and questions from the audience, you’re sure to find answers to your own questions.
The AnCan team thanks Dr. John Antonucci for submitting his opinions on hospice and palliative care in end-of-life considerations. Dr. John is a retired clinical, academic and research psychiatrist. His most recent gig before hanging up the white coat was at the VA providing care in the addiction clinics. He is also a peer in our High Risk/Recurrent/Advanced Prostate Cancer Group.
Our discussion group (High Risk/Advance Prostate Cancer) hasn’t talked much about end-of-life care or making decisions about things like resuscitation status, stopping treatment or hospice care. But the topic has come up lately, and since we have Dr. BJ Miller, co-author of a relevant book and a palliative care physician, on the AnCan Advisory Board, it is appropriate to take a first or second look at his chapter.
The authors start by defining these often-confused terms: Hospice provides end-of-life care with the goal of comfort rather than trying to cure a disease. It is actually a sub-section of palliative care. Palliative care is treatments added-on to regular medical care, at any stage of serious illness, and is intended to improve the quality of our physical, spiritual and emotional lives.
The authors explain what qualifies a patient for Hospice care. Anyone who has a terminal illness and is ready to stop treatment aimed at curing it, and who is expected to live 6 months or less, may qualify. A multidisciplinary team is then assigned and the treatments are brought to us, in our own homes if desired. (There are also residential hospices but these are not as common as often assumed.) Health insurance policies, including Medicare, cover Hospice. There are useful tips in the book on finding and choosing Hospice providers, and a section for when the hospice is not performing well. The authors encourage us to not to wait until our last few weeks to get this process going.
Palliative care is now its own medical specialty. Again, the idea is to make our lives nicer by helping to reduce a wide variety of suffering, including pain, anxiety, drug side effects, depression, fear, nausea, and spiritual pain. Most of this type of care is delivered in the hospital or outpatient clinic. Palliative care is integrated into our existing treatment plan, rather than being comprehensive like Hospice. Health insurance will generally cover these services although it might leave us with co-pays and deductibles. And again, the authors urge us to start early; there is no requirement that we be close to the end, only that we have a serious illness.
The overall effect on me of reading this chapter was not only education but also reassurance. Not only reassurance that we deserve comfort and don’t have to hide our suffering, but also that Someone will be there to care about our suffering and try to help. Quite comforting, I believe.
