There’s HOPE in unexpected places
Although we realize this is only tangentially related to breast cancer, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to pass along this excerpted version of an inspiring story that recently appeared in the New York Times…
November 25, 2009
Learning His Body, Learning to Dance
By NEIL GENZLINGER
Gregg Mozgala, a 31-year-old actor with cerebral palsy, had 12 years of physical therapy while he was growing up. But in the last eight months, a determined choreographer with an unconventional résumé has done what all those therapists could not: She has dramatically changed the way Mr. Mozgala walks.
In the process, she has changed his view of himself and of his possibilities.
Mr. Mozgala and the choreographer, Tamar Rogoff, have been working since last winter on a dance piece called “Diagnosis of a Faun.” It is to have its premiere on Dec. 3 at La MaMa Annex in the East Village, but the more important work of art may be what Ms. Rogoff has done to transform Mr. Mozgala’s body.
“I have felt things that I felt were completely closed off to me for the last 30 years,” he said. “The amount of sensation that comes through the work has been totally unexpected and is really quite wonderful.”
Cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder in which the brain does not send the proper signals to the muscles, affects gait and other movements. Those with severe cases use wheelchairs.
…
“I didn’t know what I was going to do for him,” she [Rogoff] said, “but I just knew he was inspiring to me.”
Originally, she envisioned a simple study, maybe 10 minutes long. Mr. Mozgala’s expectations when he agreed to the project were equally narrow: he said that he thought that she would either merely create a dance that made use of the physical abilities he already had or, after seeing his limitations, tell him, “Thanks but no thanks.”
Once they began working together, though, Ms. Rogoff realized that a broader approach was needed.
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She introduced Mr. Mozgala to a tension-releasing shaking technique, and it was immediately revelatory.
“My body just really took to it,” Mr. Mozgala said. “I did that for about 20 or 30 minutes, and when I stood up, I was walking completely differently. My feet were flat on the ground.”
They knew they were onto something. They began doing intensive one-on-one sessions they call body work, Ms. Rogoff using her knowledge of the body and dance-training techniques to help Mr. Mozgala “find” individual bones, muscles and tendons that he had had no command of before.
They started at the top and worked down — sternum, sacrum, knees — with Mr. Mozgala’s body and brain opening paths of communication that had not existed.
“There’s a lot of howling, screaming, crying, sweating,” Ms. Rogoff said. But “we often have these huge eureka moments.”
…
Dr. Stephen A. Paget, chief of rheumatology at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan, who has been acting as a sort of sounding board for Ms. Rogoff during the project, said the changes being wrought in Mr. Mozgala support a relatively new way of thinking about neurological impairments.
“In the past, people thought that a neurological deficit was fixed and immutable,” Dr. Paget said. “Now there’s this whole concept of neuroplasticity: the neurological system has this ability to change itself and constantly grow.”
Apparently Mr. Mozgala’s has done just that. Before, his gait was extreme enough that it would draw stares on the street. (“The lurch,” he and Ms. Rogoff have come to call it.) Now, when he is fully concentrating, a passer-by might have to look twice to realize he has a disability at all.
Unlike his earlier physical therapists, he said, Ms. Rogoff has given him knowledge of his body and specific instructions that he can employ while going about his everyday life: “Sternum down, tailbone up,” and so on.
“I have the key now,” he said. “Before, I was always being manipulated by someone else.”
Ms. Rogoff, whose father was a doctor, said that she knew little about cerebral palsy when she and Mr. Mozgala began, and that she had made a point of not learning too much. “That way I didn’t have any ideas about what he could and couldn’t do,” she said.
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As Mr. Mozgala changed, so did Ms. Rogoff’s concept for the dance. The 10-minute study she had envisioned is now a work of more than an hour, with a cast of four. The piece has antecedents in “Afternoon of a Faun,” the Nijinsky ballet. Mr. Mozgala plays a 5,000-year-old Faun who turns up in a modern-day hospital as the work explores the intersection of science and art.
Emily Pope-Blackman, an experienced dancer who has a very physical, sensuous duet with Mr. Mozgala in the piece, had the task of helping him translate the progress he was making in the body-work sessions onto the dance floor. It was, she said, a slow process of “finding out between the two of us how much force, as he got stronger, we could risk: how hard could I pull him toward me; how much could he push me over without falling over himself.”
The piece, which also features Lucie Baker and Dr. Don Kollisch (a real-life family physician), is financed with a grant from VSA Arts, a nonprofit group that supports arts by people with disabilities. After its New York run, it will be seen at the VSA International Arts Festival in June at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
Ms. Rogoff calls Mr. Mozgala “the best student I’ve ever had.” Yet both of them are emphatic about what they have not achieved.
“This isn’t a cure,” Mr. Mozgala said. “I’m always going to have cerebral palsy.”
But now he doesn’t feel so enslaved by it.
“Everybody told me there was nothing I could do,” he said. “That’s just what you hear, from the time you’re 5 to adulthood. Tamar gave me an option.”
Whether the methods they have used can translate to others remains to be seen. But Dr. Paget said their progress held a message for anyone with a neurological impairment.
“It’s not over,” he said. “There’s always a chance to change. You should not — you dare not — give up.”
Risk for Breast Cancer Recurrence Decreased by Lifestyle Changes
A new study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (published online September 8, 2009) has found that obesity, alcohol use and smoking all significantly increase the risk for new occurrences of breast cancer among breast cancer survivors.
The risk was especially high in women who were current smokers and who consumed one or more alcoholic drinks per day.
Other, previous research has suggested that maintaining a healthy weight, exercising regularly, and limiting alcohol consumption can reduce the risk of developing breast cancer to begin with.
Reducing a second occurrence of breast cancer is particularly important because of data suggesting that breast cancer survivors are 2 to 6 times more likely to develop another case than women in the general, non-survivor population are to develop breast cancer to begin with.
What’s the take-home point? While healthy lifestyle choices are smart, they are particularly important for women to help prevent brest cancer, and even more so to help prevent second occurrences of the potential killer.
Anne Bryson’s story, as told by her daughter, Megan
It was in October and the imaging center was giving away free pink HOPE t-shirt for annual mammograms. My mom had never had a mammo so I begged her to have a mammo so she could get me a free tshirt. She went in and they found a pea sized knot on her mammo, they then did a ultra sound guided biopsy that came back cancer. My mom had Breast cancer, no way, that was the hardest thing to hear and even harder having to tell her.
My mom is a nurse and had three children plus 6 grandchildren, she had always lived for others, if she heard of someone needing something she did what ever was needed to help them. She is a God fearing woman and from the moment she heard it was cancer we started praying. Mom underwent a lumpectomy only to have to go back for a complete mastecomy as the tumor had fibers coming from the circumfrance. She them underwent chemotherapy and 33 radiation treatments. There were days she wanted to give up but no matter how sick she was, or how bad the radiation burned she Cowgirled up and keep fighting.
Today she is cancer free and I thank God every day that I have a tough mom who never stopped fighting.
FLAG Post Script: Fight Like A Girl! would like to apologize to Megan for taking so long to post this story, which she submitted to us on August 14th. Megan, we thank you again for sharing your lovely story with us.
Life Is Worth Fighting For
I had known Jennifer since kindergarten. After high school we all went our separate ways and I lost track of her until a mutual friend told me that Jennifer was fighting breast cancer. Jennifer had married right away, but the marriage dissolved even before she had given birth to their son, Bruce. Jennifer never had a bad word to say about her ex-husband though, she always just said, “We were not ready for life.”
Who ever is, I wonder?
Jennifer never got a chance to get ready; before she had stopped breast-feeding Bruce, she complained to her doctor about some breast feeding issues and he quickly discovered that she had breast cancer. Jennifer lived in Canada where health care is free and she received excellent care: She had a radical mastectomy, followed by radiation therapy and strong chemotherapy. She was fighting for Bruce – so he would have a Mom. Whenever she was well enough to be with him, she would spend all her time with him. She started to homeschool Bruce and planned to homeschool him as far as she could, but Jennifer lost the fight for her life when her son was only 7 years old.
I attended Jennifer’s funeral on a hot July day just north of the Vermont / Canada border and I can tell you that there was not a dry eye in that packed little white church. One of my childhood buddies had had a crush on Jennifer all through school and he asked the pastor if he could ring the church bell as the casket left the sanctuary and was carried to the cemetary on a small rise behind the church. Robert rang the bell and we carried the casket in lockstep with the bell’s cadence. Robert rang the bell all through the graveside litergy and he continued to ring the bell even as we filed slowly away from the gravesite. Robert rang that bell for hours, finally stopping when the town constable, another school buddy of mine, asked him to stop at 8:30 that night.
I had hidden my own childhood crush on Jennifer. Perhaps quite a few of my male classmates had also been awakened to the mysteries of gender through interaction with Jennifer in grade school. The innocence of those early encounters were now jarringly abridged by the casket we had just carried and by the tolling bell. Robert’s unwillingness to stop pulling on the belfry rope echoed everyone’s great empty want that afternoon: for this to not be the abrupt end to her young and beautiful life.
Life is always woth fighting for. I wish Jennifer had won. I know… none of us are getting out of this alive and who really knows what awaits us after our last day? But there is all kind of beauty and grace on this side of the grave. The normal struggle that each of us encounters as we are introduced into our ordinary adult responsibilities; the “Burden of Normal”, provides dignity and excellence in surprising ways. Being a male, I do not have to schedule a mammogram, but I have my prostate checked regularly and I try to eat properly and exercise regularly. This life is special and I want to get all I can.
I support breast cancer research because I helped carry Jennifer’s casket up that green knoll in 1981. I purchased a Fight Like a Girl T-Shirt through this website and I know it makes a difference. If you’re a woman reading this, get a mammogram. If you’re a man, get your woman to schedule her mammogram and buy her a t-shirt when she does. Let her know that you love her; that she matters and that you want her to live a long and healthy life.
