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Making the Most of It

New symptom management program helps patients get back to their lives

When a cancer diagnosis threatens, small pleasures like these can seem trivial. That is, until you can't do them anymore. Activities like these help to make the fabric of life. That's why the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center has created a Symptom Management & Supportive Care Clinic. Its sole focus is to help people with cancer feel better so that they can continue to live a full life. Clinic staff works in collaboration with patients' oncologists.

"We believe that it's not enough to just treat the disease," said Suzette Walker, N.P.A.O.C.N.P., a nurse practitioner who leads the clinic along with Susan Urba, M.D. "Our goal is to help patients manage related symptoms and side effects to help them maintain a high quality of life."

We talked with patients about how their lives have changed since they visited the Symptom Management & Supportive Care Clinic. Here's what they told us:

Brooke Bolley has had better nausea relief since visiting the Symptom Management & Supportive Care Clinic.

Brooke Bolley

Brooke Bolley has the polished look of someone who understands beauty intuitively. She is naturally pretty, to be sure; but if you talk with her, you'll understand that the ginger highlights in her hair and the subtle charcoal lining her eyes are her own thoughtful design.

Her graceful appearance is all the more remarkable when you consider the violence cancer has inflicted on her body. In April 2009, doctors found a tumor growing between Bolley's stomach and esophagus. Four days after surgery to remove her stomach, sepsis set in. The blood infection spread, requiring the amputation of her right leg below her knee.

Since then, Bolley, a 26-year-old hairdresser, has struggled with severe nausea and pain. She wasn't able to keep pain medications down, so the Symptom Management & Supportive Care Clinic switched her prescription to patches that would deliver the medication through her skin. Walker said standard anti-nausea medications didn't work for Bolley, so they took a different approach and prescribed Olanzapine. Although Olanzapine is not widely used for nausea-it's typically used to treat schizophrenia -- several clinical studies have demonstrated its effectiveness for this symptom.

"I still get the nausea," she said. "But it's under control now."

Less than two weeks after visiting the clinic, Bolley's weight rose from 86 to 89 pounds. Now able to fit into a size 2, she went shopping.

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