Cancer survivors turn to Wellness House for support

It's a very rare occurrence when we can identify a hero among us. Even more rare is when we can work out a way to help our heroes.

Lynn Ables is a pediatrician. Born in Madison, Wis., and raised in the Chicago area, she earned her undergraduate degree at U of I and her medical degree at Northwestern. After completing her pediatric residency at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Lynn set out to help those outside her cozy sphere – she worked, first on the Hopi Indian Reservation in Arizona, then at an orphanage in India, and later in Chiapas, Mexico, during the time when the Zapatista conflict was causing such strife in that country.

Lynn eventually made her way back to the Chicago area, returning to the U.S. at the age of 37 and marrying her now-husband, then settling into a life in pediatric medicine. After caring for the world's children, however, Dr. Lynn Ables had no children of her own.

Lynn and her husband attacked the problem of their seeming infertility with the same gusto with which they'd met previous challenges in their life. After years of shots, clinic visits, artificial inseminations, in-vitro fertilizations, and the heartbreak of two miscarriages, their perseverance delivered to them a son.

Two years later, they added twins to their brood, followed three years after that by a second set of twins. During this time, the family moved from Elmwood Park to Winfield, and Dr. Ables, the family's sole breadwinner, began working at Wheaton Pediatrics in Wheaton.

In October 2006, fate soon dealt the nascent family an unforgivable blow when, one month after her twin babies' first birthdays, Lynn Ables was diagnosed with multifocal breast cancer, an invasive ductal carcinoma that had started independently in every quadrant of her left breast and metastasized to her lymph nodes. Dr. Ables' aggressive type of cancer, HER 2/neu positive, left her reeling from a diagnosis of anywhere from one year to live to a cure, with no way of knowing which direction her disease would take. To make matters worse, due to issues outside of their control, Lynn Ables and her husband had recently downgraded from two life insurance policies to none. They had been in the process of taking out a new policy when the cancer diagnosis hit. A new policy was not yet available to Dr. Ables, her family's main source of income.

Lynn's childhood friend referred her to her own oncologist. Sadly, her friend passed away four months later, in early 2007. “That was a huge, huge blow,” Lynn said. “It was, of course, January and it's now dark in these areas at that time, and that was tough. To have someone who was so close just … when you're going through it too, you have the loss of your own — when you get cancer you have so many losses,” she confessed.

Lynn was treated by an oncologist at Loyola University Medical Center; together, they took care of her immediate medical needs. But who takes care of the caregiver in her time of crisis?

“I think it took me awhile, initially, to reach out to people,” Lynn said, “I just had to be with my sadness … (losing her friend) was an added loss, but while I didn't have her on the journey with me, certainly she's still in my heart, not physically there but certainly on the journey, and other people at Wellness House stepped in.”

Lynn began attending programs at Wellness House, the cancer support center in Hinsdale, accompanied by her mother and her husband. “For awhile, with all the attention and energy required of me to manage an intense treatment plan and to manage a busy household, Wellness House was the only place I would allow myself to cry,” she said.

Lynn Ables eventually had a bilateral mastectomy in addition to chemotherapy, radiation, and monoclonal antibody treatments, in an aggressive effort to rid her body of as much of the cancer as she possibly could. Still, she wouldn't know for years whether she would become a cancer survivor or not.

In an attempt to make sure her children knew how blessed she felt to have them in her life, Lynn wrote a letter in April of 2007. “I never planned on leaving you. Goodness knows, how hard I worked, and papa worked, to get you here. I have been tortured by the thought of not being here for you,” she wrote. “I know now that I will leave you sometime much sooner than I thought. It is the saddest realization of my life.”

For cancer patients and cancer survivors, anger and guilt are unavoidable and can be just as debilitating as the disease itself. The warmth and understanding she experienced at Wellness House was to become a key part of her process of battling her cancer. “Wellness House puts perspective on it all. I mean, when you're so overwhelmed with it, and you're right in the middle of it, you just don't know the way out. You don't know where the sunny day is,” Lynn said.

Dr. Lynn Ables has been cancer-free for three years. She has been able to watch her children grow, and still practices at Wheaton Pediatrics. “Thanks to Wellness House,” she says, “I feel like I'm back and a normal human being again. I'm not just a cancer patient, I'm actually a productive human being out in the world again, and pretty much have that (cancer) on a back burner, which is a nice place to have arrived at, and I've done that with the help of Wellness House.”

Wellness House provides support for cancer patients, survivors, and their families. In an effort to guide cancer patients to become self-advocates and gain knowledgeable about cancer and its treatments, Wellness House is presenting the lecture "Navigating Survivorship: Becoming Your Own Advocate."

This free presentation, conducted by Clinical Nurse Specialist Karen Kinahan, MS, RN, APN, from the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University's STAR (Survivors Taking Action and Responsibility) program, is slated for Thursday, Feb. 3 from 7 to 8:30 p.m.

The program's presenter, Karen Kinahan, works closely with cancer survivors on late effects and survivorship issues at the Lurie Cancer Center and Children's Memorial Hospital, focusing on their unique medical and psychological needs.

“Our objective is to teach cancer patients about the importance of becoming their own advocates and taking charge of their quality of life following treatment,” explained Karen. “This presentation is designed to help survivors navigate the challenges they face as they make the transition from active treatment to post-treatment care.”

Wellness House provides information, support, and a community to help families living with cancer. Founded in 1990 by a committed group of community leaders, Wellness House serves as a vital complement to medical treatment for anyone experiencing the effects of cancer by providing a comprehensive array of programs at no cost to participants. For more information regarding Wellness House, please visit their website at www.wellnesshouse.org.