Book of Dreams: Roseville’s Wellness Within helps patients cope with the trauma of cancer

“You have cancer.”

That’s where it starts — with a jolt to the nervous system. The doctor keeps talking, but you’ve stopped listening. Soon, the treatment begins — the poking and prodding. Chemotherapy. Radiation. If everything goes well, you’re left with the constant fear of a recurrence.

Cancer is traumatic. And people need help to get through it.

Enter Wellness Within, a local nonprofit serving cancer patients and loved ones. The mission is to improve quality of life through programs like healing movement, nutrition education, meditation and expressive arts. All services are provided free of charge.

“The medical community isn’t really able to give all these services,” said Kathy Maxwell, a client at Wellness Within. Maxwell discovered the program about five years ago through a brochure at her oncologist’s office.

“I was very lucky to find them right away,” she said. Her diagnosis had overwhelmed her — she had a stage IV metastatic cancer, but doctors couldn’t find the primary source. Wellness Within helped her get through the uncertainty, fear and treatments.

She signed up for classes in nutrition, meditation, yoga, tai chi, mind and body skills and art therapy. And she found a support system.

“You make friends there,” Maxwell said. “Some people stay a long time, and some people come and go, depending on how much support they need.”

Wellness Within was designed as a place of respite. Before COVID-19, clients gathered in the comfort of a converted home in Roseville. But when the pandemic hit, the program closed its doors, and staff scrambled to switch to a virtual format.

Zoom is now used for support groups, as well as live classes in meditation, yoga, nutrition and art therapy. There’s a YouTube channel, where instructors guide viewers through breathing exercises, qigong and cooking demonstrations.

Wellness Within also offers a podcast series on a range of subjects: Conquering hair loss due to cancer treatments. Sugar substitutes and macro-nutrient balanced meals. Calming anxiety and uncertainty.

“It’s more imperative than ever that we continue to get really great resources out to the community,” said Patti Brown, Wellness Within’s founder and executive director. “The pandemic will some day be gone — we’ll have a vaccine.

“But cancer will never go away. Cancer is with us always ... People are getting diagnosed all the time during the pandemic. And so the call is louder than ever before.”

To help in those efforts, Wellness Within is hoping Book of Dreams readers will contribute $5,000 this year for production and equipment costs.

Kenneth Isaac learned of Wellness Within through his prostate cancer support group. It was 2014, and Isaac had already been through a surgery and a recurrence, followed by radiation therapy.

Then, just as his own cancer was going into remission, Isaac’s wife received her own cancer diagnosis. It was bad: a stage IV non-small cell lung cancer. She died seven months later.

Isaac was devastated. He and his wife had been high school sweethearts, married for 43 years. He had never even lived alone before.

“I had a lot to cope with,” Isaac remembered. He turned to Wellness Within for help.

He started with meditation and yoga. At first, there were challenges. Isaac was commuting to the Roseville wellness center from his home in Elk Grove. And nothing can destroy a state of inner serenity more than driving on I-80 at 6 p.m.

But Isaac kept going to class. He learned how to face things - how to calm his anxiety, how to maintain a sense of inner peace throughout the day. And eventually, after about three years, he met Lala Montesini.

Like Isaac, Montesini — now Montesini-Isaac — was a client at Wellness Within. She had been coping with a slow-growing brain tumor since 2004.

She’d had two surgeries, but the tumor grew back. Finally, the doctors had nothing to offer but chemotherapy and radiation. Montesini-Isaac refused. The doctors couldn’t guarantee the radiation wouldn’t hit her hippocampus, which controls cognitive and motor functions.

“I chose quality of life,” she said. “And my treatment is called Wellness Within.”

She enrolled in every class she could find and met Isaac in meditation class.

He seemed to know a thing or two about hiking and Montesini-Isaac asked him for some tips on good hiking trails. Soon, they were meeting for walks in downtown and on trails along the river.

He proposed on Valentine’s Day of 2019. Later that summer, the couple wed.

As Montesini-Isaac said: “When shall we enjoy life but now?”

It’s been 16 years since her diagnosis. Her last two MRIs have shown growth, but it’s slight, she said. She takes medication for the tremors — technically seizures — that have become a regular part of her life.

“My right hand starts shaking and then it subsides,” Montesini-Isaac said. “I come to my husband and say, ‘Hey, I had another episode.’” He gives her a hug. And life moves on.

“When I was first diagnosed, I would always tell my story from a victimized point of view,” Montesini-Isaac said. Not anymore. Her experiences at Wellness Within have changed her perspective.

“I’m grateful to be alive,” she said. “Every morning when I wake up, I say, ‘I bless my day.’ I don’t know how it’s going to be, but I’m just happy, healthy and alive. And that’s what matters.”