AUGUSTA, Maine — The Harold Alfond Center for Cancer Care in Augusta offers an in-person breast cancer support group for anyone battling breast cancer or anyone who's a survivor of it. The group meets once a month and Heather Moore started it from scratch.
Moore was a case manager at the Alfond Center for Health for 15 years. Then, a routine mammogram found a lump and she was diagnosed with triple-positive breast cancer. She went through treatment at the Harold Alfond Center for Cancer Care and is now cancer-free.
Moore decided to arrange a meeting with the cancer center's administrator because she felt she could make a difference somehow at the center, and after her eagerness, a position was created for her called the Holistic Healthcare Coordinator in 2022.
Now, she facilitates a support group at the center that has become a lifeline for many women who attend, about 12 of them every month, many of them driving more than an hour to be there.
Moore said their group was one of the first support groups in the state to get back to in-person support, as many have stayed virtual.
NEWS CENTER Maine was there for the gathering they had in October, which is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
"It did steal my joy for a couple of months, it's a tough journey," Bonnie Collins said, one of the group participants.
"We have people come here for advice, we talk about things that we may not be able to talk with our family, personal things about symptoms and things like that, we offer tips and our fears and everything we are going through, it's a pretty powerful group," Moore said.
Many of them share a lot, others listen a lot, but they are all there for the same reason: to support each other.
"I definitely think it is important, none of us have wanted to go down this journey, we have just been all of a sudden faced with it to have to deal with it in whatever way we find comforting," Christine Landes, another group participant, said.
This group is an opportunity for people to feel understood, a safe place for them to discuss any topic of interest, a place to manage feelings, fears, and sadness, and to share any relevant tips.
"It's nice to share our experiences even though everybody has a separate story, we've all been through some traumatic thing just with the diagnosis of cancer," Moore expressed.
"You quickly re-prioritize things that are going on in your life and sort out things that really don't matter, things that do matter. Work up your bucket list a little quicker, and it made me quickly realize how important some relationships are to me and maybe how less important others were," Collins said. "Cancer initially will steal your joy, and it did for me for the first couple of months, but once treatment started, I got my fight back."
"Going through my treatment in 2019 with no history of breast cancer in my family, I needed to have somebody else just listen to me sometimes, it's new friends, it's new relationships, it's something that nobody can ever take away from me like cancer can take so much from everybody else," Landes said. "Cancer is not a death sentence, per se, we all have something we have to deal with, it's just how we learn to deal with it."
Men are also welcome to that or any of the support groups available at the center.
Attached below is a list of the different support groups being offered at the moment.