They brought sleeping bags, hiking boots and breast prostheses. Also guts, tears and belly laughs.
The five Chicago-area women had survived battles with breast cancer. They came to Camp Echo, the western Michigan outpost of Evanston’s McGaw YMCA, to pit themselves against a series of physical and mental challenges designed to help them find out, and celebrate, the stuff they are made of.
Having faced down death, they already knew it was fairly stern stuff. But on the chilly pilot weekend of the Cancer Wellness Program at Camp Echo, a project of the McGaw YMCA and Northwestern Memorial Hospital, each had something she wanted to accomplish.
Crystal Mason, 40, a tall, lean women with a pixie face who had been diagnosed at age 35, wanted to walk away from breast cancer and close the door behind her.
“It’s time to move on,” said Mason, who lives on the North Side and works as an insurance-industry field representative.
Nancy Amicangelo, 49, of the Near North Side, the compact, composed manager of a bank subsidiary’s short-term trading desk, thought the weekend had sounded like a grand adventure.
It also seemed a way to prove, she said in a Boston accent that could cut glass, that even post-cancer, “there are no limitations.”
Avis Weisman, 56, an extroverted North Sider with a short, hip shock of red hair, wanted to test herself mentally and physically. And she saw herself at a crossroads in dealing with the physical limitations she developed when arthritis set in after chemotherapy.
“I want to either accept my body as it is — that it’s not the same and never will be — or make some decisions, like getting a personal trainer,” she said.
Ellen Roberts, 55, of Sleepy Hollow, wanted to mentally end her struggle with breast cancer so she can move on to the serious medical battles she now faces against myasthenia gravis and diabetes.
“I’m trying to bring a sense of closure to my breast-cancer experience,” said Roberts, a member of the Elgin Community College board. “I’m putting it in a nice little memory box in my mind; I’m going to put it away for a while.”
And Joan Jacobs, 70, a retired longtime sales associate at Tiffany & Co. who had never used a sleeping bag before, wanted to push herself — maybe.
“I was saying to a friend, `Why am I doing this? I don’t want to be 40 feet in the air. No way,’ ” said Jacobs, a British-born world traveler with the elegant carriage of the ballet dancer she once was. “But it was a challenge. If other people can do it, I can do it.”
Nearly three years in the planning, the Camp Echo program was intended to offer breast-cancer survivors an opportunity to test and celebrate themselves, said Christopher Hart, the McGaw YMCA’s director of youth and family services, who developed the program.
“There is a certain amount of inner strength people have when they face a disease, and a lot of that goes unrecognized and unnoticed,” he said.
“The weekend is almost a simulation of that experience of rising to a challenge — something they can carry through to their lives and know they can face any challenge ahead.”
And the women could trade their roles as patients being healed for adventurers taking chances and supporting others, said Megan Jones Hart, an occupational therapist with Northwestern Health South who worked closely on the the weekend with Chrisopher Hart, her husband.
The Y asked Northwestern Memorial Hospital to be its medical partner in the program. The breast-cancer survivors participating this weekend were members of a breast cancer survivor’s health group at Northwestern.
In a circle in the dining hall on the first night, Christopher Hart told the women that they would decide how much risk they would take — and that the challenge would go beyond walking across high ropes.
“Adventure education is nothing more than stepping beyond your usual boundaries,” he said. “We’re not necessarily talking about physical risk. It’s emotional risk, personal risk.”
– – –
In the morning, physical and occupational therapists from Northwestern, in their only professional capacity of the weekend before they joined the adventuring group, assessed the former patients’ posture, flexibility and strength.
Several women expressed concern about lymphedema. Breast-cancer patients who have lymph nodes removed can be at risk for lymphedema, a complication in which fluids pool in the arm because the lymphatic system is no longer able to help transport them out. Jacobs had already had several bouts with it.
To avoid muscle tears or infections that can lead to lymphedema, some of the women had been advised to wear gardening gloves and avoid lifting heavy objects. Would climbing on ropes be safe?
Reassurance came from Jones Hart, who works with lymphedema patients. She told the group that lymphedema is rare and that some doctors believe only a small group of patients prone to it will get it. The main guideline: They should avoid movements that would have made them sore before the surgery.
Then it was on to team exercises. Some required people to work together toward a goal; others tested how quickly participants could recall each others’ names. All got people laughing.
But the afternoon brought the killer maze.
To the naked eye, it looked like a harmless arrangement of elastic ropes strung between trees and posts.
But the women didn’t get to use their eyes. One by one, they were led, eyes closed, to spots on the ropes. They were to imagine they were trying to escape a volcano through blinding smoke. They could talk to each other, but couldn’t open their eyes. And they had to be touching a rope at all times.
For 25 maddening minutes, the women groped along the ropes, blindly retracing dead ends. Finally, Jones Hart found the exit, was allowed to return — with her eyes closed — and talked the others out with her.
Afterward, they sat in a circle to debrief. Mason, the youngest of the former patients and at times the most emotionally raw, was struck by the frustration of not having any signposts.
Their movements through the maze had been utterly random, she said, as random as — getting cancer.
“That’s where a lot of anger comes about the illness,” she said. “I have a basic philosophy that if you are a good person and try to help other people you’re going to be all right.”
Her voice broke. “And it doesn’t happen that way.
“I never killed anybody. I try not to let my actions hurt anyone. Why me?”
That night, the breast-cancer survivors gathered in a circle and wrestled with questions posed earlier by YMCA staffers. What did they hope to accomplish this weekend, and what would they like to leave behind?
Amicangelo had bulldozed through cancer treatment without skipping a professional beat. The devastating day all her hair fell out and she didn’t have her wig yet, she ended up being only a little late for work.
But here among fellow survivors, she confessed that what she wanted to leave was her fear.
“I want to finally feel less vulnerable,” said Amicangelo. Losing her composure, she wept. “It’s such a contradiction going through this. You know you’re stronger, but it can happen again.”
“I would like to leave behind that my entire identity is as a cancer survivor,” Mason said. “That is not all I am.”
She cried for a few minutes, then looked up at the others.
“This is great,” she said. The room exploded in laughter.
– – –
On Sunday morning, the group walked down a dirt road and then into the woods to face their culminating challenge.
Six 40-foot-high telephone poles loomed higher than anyone had thought 40 feet looked like. Between them were a variety of methods of traversing the air — ropes, cables, a balance beam, cargo netting.
There was silence.
“There’s nothing that we did that’s prepared us for this,” Weisman said softly.
Hart went through safety procedures. Each woman was fitted with a helmet and a safety harness, which was to be attached to an overhead cable by two snare lines. If she fell, she would fall only a couple of feet and be pulled by the snare lines and harness into a sitting position.
There were two ways to get to the top — a ladder or a tall piece of cargo netting. A superbly conditioned YMCA adventure counselor in her 20s remarked that going up the net was so exhausting that she rarely did it.
So Roberts chose the net. She was about to start climbing when Mason was seized by fear for her. What if Roberts cut her hand on the ropes, and an infection led to lymphedema?
“Even paper cuts put us at risk,” she called over worriedly to Hart.
“I’m OK,” Roberts said firmly, and put one foot on the net.
“You go, girl,” said Raeanne Miller, an occupational therapist, holding down the bottom of the net.
Roberts went. Slowly, determinedly, fiercely.
From the ground came encouragement: “Nice, Ellen!” “Use your legs, Ellen.” “You’re doing great!”
She stopped to rest, clinging to the ropes. A foot slipped past the foothold. She hung on with her arms and other leg, and kept climbing.
She panted. She rested. But she kept climbing, until finally at the top, she slid onto the tiny platform attached to the pole.
The woods filled with cheers as she waved in exhausted triumph.
“I can’t believe she did that,” Amicangelo said in awe.
Only then the women went on to do other unbelievable things. Mason climbed up the netting and went around the whole course, proving so unflappable on one particularly terrifying cable bridge that she cracked a joke.
Jacobs climbed up the ladder before weakness and pain in her arm forced her to request a lift down by rope belay. She descended with such balletic elan, arm raised and toes pointed, that everyone cheered again.
Weisman climbed partway up both the ladder and the cargo net before arthritis and fear took over. But she went on to cheer everyone else, freely dispensing praise and encouragement.
Amicangelo stopped clinging to the snare line halfway across the balance beam. At the urging of Jonathan Samuels, a YMCA adventure trip leader waiting at the next platform, she slowly raised her hands out beside her.
“You can do it, Nancy,” someone shouted from the ground.
She took a tiny step without hanging on to anything.
“I didn’t die,” she said, the words a half-question.
“OK,” Samuels said. “Now take two little steps.”
And she walked all the way to the end without touching the rope.
Roberts, to the amazement of all, traversed the dreaded “Hourglass” — a complex arrangement of ropes in which the hand and foot ropes switch positions in the middle.
It was a feat so difficult that an agile young physical therapist was the only other person who managed it. Another health professional decades younger than Roberts tried and gave up.
Each woman returned to the ground and was met with hugs and congratulations. Roberts looked up at the scene of her triumph with satisfaction.
“To me, this was an achievement,” she said quietly. “I set a goal, and I achieved it. There are a lot of parts of my life I can’t control. This I can.”
– – –
The women sat in a circle one last time.
Amicangelo said she had been as paralyzed with fear as she had been when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“Just the fact that I was able to push through it at all was great,” she said. “It was terrifying, but great.”
Would they do it again?
“If I felt the need to do it again, I could,” said Roberts. “But I don’t feel the need.”
“The five of us are part of this club that we don’t want to be a part of,” said Mason, breaking down. “There are all these good things that come out of it — strength and inspiration.
“But we don’t want to have to have anything more to prove. We’ve done it.”
And having done it, they signed a breast-cancer survivors’ walk T-shirt to be hung in the dining hall with all the summer campers’ plaques, and took their camaraderie, pride and victories back home.
Another Cancer Wellness Program at Camp Echo has been scheduled for Sept. 19-21. For more information, call Christopher Hart at the McGaw YMCA, 847-475-7400, ext. 223.
