ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604290049
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY STAFF WRITER
HEALTH PROFESSIONALS took on the roles of of those they minister to in "The Life of a Group.''
``Steve Kennedy,'' 47, was a happily married English professor with three grown children who hoped to write the "great Southern novel." But since the mole removed from his arm was diagnosed as a melanoma, he's not sure he has time enough left for the book.
Melanoma is a highly malignant tumor that usually occurs on the skin. Some tumors can be treated successfully with surgery; but if they've spread, the outlook for the patient is poor.
In ``Professor Kennedy's'' case, the cancer had spread. How he coped with that was one of the stories that unfolded during a recent dramatization of how cancer support group members confront the realities of life-threatening illness.
The teacher-character was portrayed by real-life Dr. Stephen Kennedy, who is with Oncology/Hematology Associates of Southwest Virginia.
Last week, he and other health-care professionals went before an audience of peers to reconstruct reactions of cancer patients who are in treatment.
The performance was also filmed for a video, "The Life of a Group," which will be used to encourage health workers to react to patients as whole people and not just identify them by their illnesses.
"The Life of a Group" format was developed by Jerry Carter, a Roanoke Valley native and a Roanoke College graduate. It was first staged in 1982 at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salem, where Carter was a social worker.
Carter, who now lives in Philadelphia, has taken his show all over, including to Hong Kong. He has a grant from SmithKline Beechum Pharmaceuticals to develop the video, which he will market to health-care facilities.
The drama is largely improvised conversation that grow out of Carter's questions to the characters. What he most hopes to achieve is to make everyone aware that sick people do have choices: in treatment, in how they relate to their families, and in how they spend the rest of their lives.
When Carter arrives in a community to put on the show, he solicits health-care professionals to take roles and gives them a basic character to play, but no details about the character. They have a day to think about how they want the characters to respond as members of a group.
Julie Watts decided to be angry.
Watts, a clinical nurse oncologist with Roanoke Memorial Hospital, has never experienced cancer, not even in a family member.
"I think I would be angry if it happened to me," she said.
Watts took the part of ``Julie Wise,'' 39, and recently diagnosed with Stage I - or most treatable - breast cancer. She made her character a successful lawyer who was following in her father's footsteps.
``Julie'' wanted only the facts and was almost too busy even to consider a support group. She blocked out an hour of time for it, she told the group at their first meeting.
Watts' character played well against the role created by Kathryn St.Clair, a professional counselor with Lewis-Gale Medical Center. Her ``Kathy'' character had been a cosmetics saleswoman in the District of Columbia, but was battling breast cancer that had spread to her spine.
Imagine the reaction of lawyer ``Julie'' when ``Kathy'' asked the group members for their astrology signs.
By the final meeting of the group, however, the two women had grown toward each other. The cosmetics worker became more assertive and was no longer afraid to ask her doctor to explain treatment possibilities more thoroughly. The lawyer had softened and lost some of her anger, and she worried less about work.
"Maybe I'm getting used to being a patient," said ``Julie.''
St.Clair had an advantage over the rest of the cast because she performed in the very first "Life of a Group" and because she uses psychodrama in her work with patients. Even so, the performance - in which St.Clair's ``Kathy'' gets better - had extra special meaning, she said, because the very day she was on stage a friend was being operated on for cancer.
All the cast members, which included nurses Trish Tarpley and Debbie Roseberry and Dr. Gerald Schertz of Oncology/Hematology, came away more sensitized. When they put on the hats and turbans that hid the hair loss from chemotherapy treatments, the circumstances of their patients became more real.
Learning how to use a cane and how to wind a turban left a "spooky" feeling, Roseberry said.
In a series of three meetings, the group evolved from people who saw little in common into a family that popped beers to celebrate the good news that ``Kathy's'' cancer was in remission and who wept to mourn the loss of ``Professor Kennedy''.
A few minutes before the final meeting on stage, the characters were given notes revealing who among them would improve and who would die.
"In the beginning, we had been joking about who was going to be the one struck down," said Kennedy the physician. "When my character's name was picked out, it didn't affect me. But then when I saw all these people, whom I know [at work] gathered in a happy mood, having their pictures made and saying goodbye, and I wasn't part of the group, it hit me that I was the void."
"The reality of that role hit me very, very hard," he said.
"A very thin line separates provider and provided-for," said Kennedy, who had a mole removed from his arm recently. His mole wasn't malignant, but the hours of waiting to find that out were filled with anxiety, the doctor said.
LENGTH: Long : 102 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: PAUL L. NEWBY II/Staff. Dr. Stephen Kennedy, who playedby CNBthe role of ``Professor Kennedy,'' said, "The reality of that role
hit me very, very hard.'" Graphic: Chart: A cancer doctor's wish for
patients.