Ellie Tesher's column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Learning to live well with cancer

OUT OF THE terrible, increasing numbers of cancer incidence arise some
extraordinary stories of how people and their families courageously
"live" with cancer.

Last week in New York city, I visited a threestorey Greenwich Village
brownstone that offers a free haven for cancer patients and their
families to develop a new life with cancer by sharing their fears and
unknowns with others going through the same experiences. They learn to
cook and eat to boost their health, have lectures and guided workshops,
join in creative projects, all as a community.

Called Gilda's Club, it was inspired by U.S. comedienne Gilda Radner,
who honed her art at Toronto's Second City and touched millions with her
zany yet vulnerable approach to humor. She died of ovarian cancer at age
42 in 1989.

Now Gilda's dream is coming to Toronto. Slated to open in a year and
the first in Canada, the club is a nonprofit organization, free for
cancer patients of all ages and their loved ones, who must meet the
challenges of getting on with life during chem otherapy, radiation and
other cancer treatments.

As the New York club's founding executivedirector Joanna Bull says,
``It's about learning how to live with cancer, whatever the outcome.''

I was recently struck by the enormous effort of will and energy cancer
demands through the moving story of an old school friend, Jimmy Cutler,
and his wife Joanne, who became his partner in staying alive and living
well.

Jimmy was the mischievous, skinny kid who got high marks and pulled
funloving pranks. He became a popular dentist and had the foresight to
open his practice in Yorkville, just emerging from its hippie era to
become a hot location. He became dentist to the stars who stayed at the
nearby Four Seasons Hotel and was Gilda Radner's dentist and friend,
too.

He and Joanne, an artist, formed this marriage (the second for both of
them) with the ideal of a creative, adventurous team. Six months after
their wedding in 1985, Cutler was diagnosed with colon cancer.

Together, they entered a frightening, confusing world of surgery,
remission, recurrence in the liver, treatment, new cancers in other
sites.

Cutler was determined to try anything that made sense as a
cancerfighter yoga, nutrition, alternative therapies.

He became passionate about life's joys and convinced Joanne to sell
their elegant house and rent a city flat so they could spend more time at
a 150yearold log cabin in a cove of Lake Simcoe where the tranquillity
of taking out a canoe, reading in a hammock and sitting under a favorite
tree gave him the strength to go on.

He died on May 22, age 56.

He had recently become involved with the Gilda's Club forming in
Toronto. Besides New York, there's a club in Hollywood, Fla., London and a
dozen in development across the United States.

When I walked into the comfortable, welcoming atmosphere of New York's
Houston St. building, it felt like home. A cosy kitchen, a cheery
community room, a quiet reading and relaxing area, a children's playroom,
separate rooms to network with others who share a specific disease like
breast or prostate cancer, a crafts room with evidence of artistic
projects, all counter the hospital and clinic settings cancer patients
must attend for their treatments.

Other cancer support groups are often for only one type of cancer or
mostly provide treatment information. Here, the focus is emotional and
social support instead of the isolation and barrage of medical information
cancer patients usually experience.

There's discussion aided by a professional so people learn from each
other. Here, with expert speakers, computers for online information and
networking, cancer patients help each other make the informed choices they
must make along with their medical
teams.

Bull, who was Radner's cancer therapist in Los Angeles, says that when
Radner and her husband, actor Gene Wilder, stayed in their Connecticut
home, she missed the supportive wellness community available in
California. After her death, Wilder and two ot her founders brought Bull
to New York to start the club in Radner's name.

This past year, a dedicated group of Toronto residents some of them
cancer survivors themselves has been gathering funds and corporate
support to open a downtown Toronto location similar to New York's by the
fall of 1998. They're working toward a $ 3 million goal for opening the
facility and covering operating costs for its first number of years.

It can't come soon enough. Says Bull, who herself has lived with
leukemia for 10 years, ``Cancer is totally unpredictable. There's always
hope until it's clear to an individual that he or she is dying.''

My school friend Jimmy Cutler had the rare ability to teach himself the
brave, bold lessons on which Gilda's Club is centred: Cancer offers
choice. You can wait to die or you can truly live for the time you
have.

Ellie Tesher's column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Contents copyright 1996, 1997,
The Toronto Star.