Cancer Counselors

What do you say to someone who has cancer? The wrong thing, probably. Like most people confronted with a diagnosis that often amounts to a death sentence, Beverly Hills (Calif.) Realtor Fred Harris, 62, sank into despair when his doctors told him last February that he had inoperable cancer of both lungs. Nor did his friends help decrease his depression. Some, unsure as to how they should talk to Harris, avoided him; a few, mistakenly fearing contagion, forbade their children to go near him. Others overwhelmed him with solicitude. One friend, ignoring Harris' haggard appearance, insisted that he looked "great"; another inquired with unintentional cruelty: "How long did the doctor give you?"

For two months following his discharge from the hospital, Harris looked morbidly toward death. He sold his yacht, visited gun shops to look over the stock, went to the city morgue to view the bodies of suicides. Then a friend requested that he visit an acquaintance hospitalized with lung cancer, and the visit changed his attitude. "He was as afraid as I was," said Harris after talking with the man. "He seemed very appreciative when I left."

Strict Rules. So was Harris, for the visit convinced him that he could do something to help ease the isolation that cancer so frequently imposes on its victims. Working through the Los Angeles unit of the American Cancer Society, he has formed an unusual self-help program through which cancer victims who have more or less adjusted to their illness counsel those who have not, and aid each other in carrying the awful burdens of their affliction.

Harris' plan borrows heavily from programs already in operation to rehabilitate victims of breast, bowel and larynx cancer following surgery. But it differs from them in an important respect. It concentrates on patients whose cancers probably cannot be cured--and who are therefore likely to be distrustful of anyone who attempts to cheer them up.

Harris' program offers empathy, not sympathy. "Nobody," says Harris, "knows what it's like except somebody who's been there." Volunteer helpers, who must have their doctors' permission to participate, undergo training by physicians and psychiatrists who evaluate their emotional as well as physical fitness for the program. Those who qualify are then carefully matched by age, social and economic background, interests and type of cancer, with patients requesting help. "I try to imbue them with confidence and then I let them talk," says Harris. "But you have to be honest. If you're not honest, you've lost a confidence."

The rules under which the program operates are strict. Helpers are forbidden to exchange medical information with their "patients," particularly hearsay about new treatments. Nor, in order to avoid emotional involvement and dependency, are they allowed to make more than three visits to any one patient. Even these limited contacts may end traumatically. When a patient he had visited three times died suddenly, Harris, who is undergoing weekly drug treatments for his own cancer, was devastated. "My confidence was completely destroyed," he said. "It took a lot of self-discipline to come back." But Harris has learned to remain unruffled even when thrown out of a hospital room while attempting to visit a man still stunned at learning that he had cancer. "His temper tantrum, was part of the disease. He couldn't have unleashed it on his family," Harris explained.

Another typical volunteer is Keith Stefan, 23, a self-employed photographer who has Hodgkin's disease, a cancer of the lymphatic system. He is always ready to talk with other cancer victims, assuring them that he is managing to carry on despite his illness. "I know exactly what you're going through," he told a girl who called him late one evening to tell him that she too had Hodgkin's. "I know how hard it is, not only for you but for your family too. You can handle it if you want to badly enough."

Cancer Society officials, who hope to obtain organizational recognition and funding for Harris' program, agree with University of Southern California Psychiatrist Judd Marmor that the project "can also be therapeutic for the person who is doing the helping. It gives him a purpose in life at a point where the curtain seems to be drawing down."

The program's most enthusiastic endorsements, however, come from the cancer patients themselves. Says a 31-year-old divorced mother of four, who lost a leg to bone cancer last year: "If I could have seen someone then who had had the same operation and was walking around, it would have helped a lot."

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