Lives In Progress

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The March issue of Lives In Progress features: The Healing Force of Social Networks - an article about Kathy Hynes-Kadish, a breast cancer survivor and volunteer for SHARE, a breast and ovarian cancer support organization which demonstrates the healing power of social networks. NICK'S PICKS include an article from the New England Journal of Medicine written by a doctor involved with relief work in Haiti, who describes the songs that rise up out of the rubble at night. Things We Should Know : The Rule of Yes - a way of thinking and a philosophy that redirects tension and opens the creative spirit in everyday life and The Rule of Listening - which quotes from an article in the Annals of Family Medicine about improvisation as a method to train doctors to listen and respond to patients. Click on the link to read the newsletter: 'Lives In Progress March 2010'

by Nicholas Wolff, LCSW, BCD, TEP In the days and months following the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, immersed in my role as a lead trauma counselor on a team working with survivors and family members of the missing, I felt the stirrings of change within myself that continues to this day. Tragedy feels darker, acts of kindness more transcendent. A heightened sensitivity to the effects of disaster on victims and the healers who rush to their side when things are at their worst is with me always now. An article by a physician doing relief work in Haiti after the recent earthquate published in last week's New England Journal of Medicine resonates to this and adds a haunting reminder of the humanizing power of music: "After the January 12 earthquake, I traveled with a national disaster team from the Department of Health and Human Servicesto Haiti, where we set up a mobile tent hospital on the sitesof a devastated school and a nearby adolescent clinic. My 2-weekdeployment was

A fantastic, food-centered fund-raiser I attended at Chelsea Piers last fall – the annual “A Second Helping of Life” event for SHARE, a not-for-profit organization that provides free support services for women with breast and ovarian cancer - turned into a mini-reunion with some remarkable women I was privileged to work with at Gracie Square Hospital in the 1980’s. Reconnecting with this group to celebrate and champion our colleague and dear friend Kathy Hynes-Kadish, a metastatic breast cancer survivor and SHARE volunteer, combined with the “right-over-there” celebrity-sightings and nonstop samplings of some of New York’s best food and drink made the evening a trifecta of good energy that was almost too much of a good thing. (When I spotted Judy Gold with a tray of canapés and called out her name 3 times as if she were an old college buddy I knew the wine-tasting portion of the evening was over for me.) Kathy has been living with metastatic breast cancer since 1999, presently shows “n