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Finding strength
To help assure such care continues, Dana-Farber has created a chaplain intern program in which students at Harvard Divinity School and other theological schools spend an academic year or summer training with Moczynski and visiting patients at DFCI and its partner hospitals. Margo McLoughlin, a 2003 graduate of the program who is now a staff chaplain at the Institute, says the experience of seeing how patients from many different religious denominations sought the same answers had a dramatic impact.
"It's a powerful way to heighten one's awareness and explore your own priorities and spiritual development," says McLoughlin. Her background is in Buddhist study and practice. She offers a popular storytelling series in Dana-Farber's chapel featuring tales from various faiths. "All people seek meaning from the cancer experience, whether it's constructed within the framework of a particular religious tradition or comes from home life and family or through nature. The challenge for patients — and for us as chaplains — is to find the inner source of strength that works best for each of them."
In the "spiritual corner" of Dana-Farber's main Blum Center, Susan DeCristofaro, RN, MSN, OCN, helps doctors such as thoracic oncologist Arthur Skarin, MD, find appropriate resources for their patients.
In situations where patients endure great pain or die, the faith of their loved ones and caregivers can be severely tested. It is easy, caregivers agree, to "get angry" at God, and not so easy to move past such emotions. "Especially when a child is suffering, people can go through a form of 'spiritual distress,' a phase of life when things just don't make sense," explains Jennifer Mack, MD, a pediatric oncologist and researcher at the Institute. "For some, it takes a great deal of time to get to a place where they can live with what's happened. We as medical caregivers can help them through this process of finding meaning."
Many former patients or families reaching a point of acceptance seek a different sort of spiritual comfort by volunteering at Dana-Farber or making gifts to the Institute. Robin Feldman, for instance, is helping comfort and inform other metastatic breast cancer patients through participation in One-to-One: The Cancer Connection, a program that pairs experienced patients/survivors and relatives with new ones facing the same disease. "I believe part of the reason I'm still here is because I was meant to help other people," she says.
Likewise, many DFCI caregivers undergo training to better connect spiritually with patients and families. Mack completed a six-month pastoral care fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital offered through Boston's Kenneth B. Schwartz Center in which physicians, nurses, and other clinicians learn the intricacies of spiritual care while addressing their own belief systems. Many nurses and providers at DFCI have taken undergraduate courses on world religions, and staff members from different religious backgrounds have gathered informally over the years for nondenominational prayer sessions at the Institute's chapel, the Blum Center (before it opens for the day), and other venues.
"When you [have cancer], you want to talk to everybody you run into about your feelings; with their support, you can have hope and faith in you future."
—Susan DeCristofaro, RN, MSN, OCN
"Spirituality has grown within the entire health-care community, but oncology has been at the forefront in helping patients talk through their personal experiences of faith for the 30 years I've been in nursing," says DFCI Director of Patient and Family Education Susan DeCristofaro, RN, MSN, OCN, who oversees the Blum Center. "When you are concerned about death, as cancer patients often are, your religious boundaries tend to dissolve. You want to talk to everybody you run into about your feelings; with their support, you can have hope and faith in your future."
With such optimism in mind, Adrienne Cullen felt compelled to give herself and other DFCI patients another faith-based outlet. Touched by how light shining through a multicolored window in Dana-Farber's chapel "transformed it into a spiritual place," she worked with Moczynski to create the newsletter Stained Glass Reflections. Since debuting in summer 2003, its pages (found at www.dana-farber.org/spirituality) have been filled with insights, poetry, and prayers from people representing a variety of beliefs united in their cancer fight.
"I've come to a place where, spiritually, I truly feel cancer is a gift," says Cullen, a breast cancer survivor who now serves on the quarterly publication's editorial committee. "When you are faced with challenges and get through them with the help of God and your faith, it gives you the strength to go on."
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