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From Adjacent Chemo Chairs to Best Friends: How Two Women Found Friendship During Cancer Treatment
5 min. read
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Baptist Health Miami Cancer Institute
This is the story of a friendship formed in a most unlikely place — between two women brought together by life-changing diagnoses. If you’re expecting a tale of a medical miracle or an extraordinary cure, you won’t find it here — yet you will discover a story of unexpected healing.
Today, on World Cancer Day, we bring you Ani Wilbanks and Candy Formanek. Their paths intersected at Baptist Health Miami Cancer Institute as they prepped for chemotherapy appointments. Theirs is a once-in-a-lifetime bond built on shared resilience, hope and a will to live, despite the odds.
(Watch now: On World Cancer Day, meet Ani Wilbanks and Candy Formanek, patients at Baptist Health Miami Cancer Institute. Their once-in-a-lifetime bond is built on resilience, hope and a will to live, despite the odds. Video by Alex Calienes, Gort Productions.)
Beautiful “inside and out”
“She’s a beautiful soul, inside and out,” Ani says of Candy.
“She gives me hope when I’m feeling a little bit nervous,” Candy says of Ani. “She makes me smile. She makes me laugh.”
The irony of their situation is that their prognosis is poor. Ani, 67, was diagnosed four years ago with stage 4 breast cancer. At another area hospital she was told she’d just be receiving palliative care. That’s when she came to Miami Cancer Institute.
Stage 4 cancer is also called metastatic cancer, meaning it has spread to other organs or tissues from its original location.
“Chances are it’s 99 percent curtains,” Ani says with a laugh. “But there’s a 1 percent chance I may live. Somebody has to live and why can’t it be me?” Ani has had more than 120 chemotherapy treatments and is still fighting.
Candy, 77, survived a breast cancer diagnosis in 2014, but in 2021 a pain in her abdomen whenever she exercised sent her back to physicians. It was stage 4 stomach cancer. Doctors told her it was inoperable and that it wasn’t curable, but that it was treatable with chemotherapy.
“Ani’s always saying we can be that 1 percent,” she says. “I’ve learned from Ani to always be positive. Unless you’ve had cancer, you don’t realize how important it is to share the good and the bad. And we’re going to live the best life we can live.”
At first glance, the women appear to be opposites. Ani is dressed in a bright green vest and jeans. Candy is sporting a pink polka-dot shirt and white pants. Ani still works as a mortgage loan officer and has three daughters and two granddaughters (with a third on the way). Candy, a retiree from Northwest Airlines, has no living family. Ani calls herself a lover and a hugger. Candy labels herself humble and shy.
Yet the two recognized the kind-heartedness in each other immediately, they say. At first, they sat in adjacent rooms during chemo. Soon, they opened the sliding door between them so they could share their life stories. It wasn’t long before they decided they could hear better if they were both in the same room.
“I said, ‘Take my chemo chair and I’ll sit in the regular chair,’ “recalls Ani, who never used the chemo chair anyway. “And the rest is history. We sit together, we laugh because we’re like two teenagers, we have a wonderful time.”
Uplifted by Music
Their infusion sessions — as well as all visits to Miami Cancer Institute — are made better, they agree, by the talented musicians and artists who are part of the Institute’s Arts in Medicine program. “It’s a wonderful, wonderful program,” Candy says. “It relaxes people. It’s very uplifting.”
Funded entirely by donations to Baptist Health Foundation, Arts in Medicine currently has eight contracted musicians and visual artists and two board-certified music therapists. They perform and lead art activities in the lobby and the waiting and treatment areas.
And when the musicians ask for requests, the two ladies are soon singing along and dancing. While they know they can rely on each other for support 24/7, they say their experience is made better because of many of the other services offered at the Institute.
“The Arts in Medicine program has been incredibly impactful for our patients,” says M. Beatriz Currier, M.D., medical director of the Cancer Patient Support Center and the Institute’s chief of psychiatric oncology. “Through our research, we have shown that the program has significantly improved health outcomes in patients during cancer treatment. Specifically, among over 4,000 cancer patients surveyed during chemotherapy infusion, 92 percent reported significant reduction in anxiety levels, 80 percent reported significant improvement in depressed mood and 83 percent reported reduced pain levels with the artistic encounters.”
M. Beatriz Currier, M.D., chief of psychiatric oncology at Baptist Health Miami Cancer Institute and medical director of the Institute's Cancer Patient Support Center
The services of the Cancer Patient Support Center are vast and also include:
· Stress management and resiliency workshops
· Massage therapy and acupuncture
· Blue-light meditation suites with visual-guided imagery
· Nutrition and exercise classes
· Rehabilitation to restore physical functioning and improve physical conditioning
· Education about wellness and the prevention of other cancers
· An insomnia clinic
“We take care of the whole patient,” Dr. Currier explains. “Comprehensive cancer care at Miami Cancer Institute includes state-of-the-art, cutting-edge treatment of the cancer, coupled with treatments that address all the needs of the patient during their cancer journey. Arts in Medicine is one part of the transformative care here at the Institute. We address the physical, emotional, social and spiritual needs of our patients.”
It's all about the people
Ani and Candy agree that their care — from their medical oncologist, Grace Wang, M.D., their patient navigators, the nurses, radiation therapy staff, security employees and volunteers who greet them by name — couldn’t be delivered by a more compassionate group of people.
“They are our cheerleaders. We hug and kiss them a thousand times. We live in gratitude every day,” says Ani. When her husband died suddenly while she was under treatment, Ani reached out to Dr. Currier, who had met with her before, to help her process the tragedy. Ani was also uplifted when the Arts in Medicine staff played a song for her husband and worked with her to create a piece of art in his honor that she has framed and placed in her bedroom.
Candy’s experience at Miami Cancer Institute impressed her so much that she has made a gift to Baptist Health Foundation. “Everyone here makes you feel welcome, like family or a very, very good friend,” she says. “There’s no better place than Miami Cancer Institute.”
Their message, they say, is that people make a difference, as does their bond.
“The role of friendship in healing is absolutely key,” says Ani, who says the women call and text each other daily and often have lunch together after treatment. “It just makes the journey so much more beautiful and sacred.”
To support the work at Miami Cancer Institute, visit BaptistHealth.net/Foundation.
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