Welcome to the Rotary Club of Cataraqui-Kingston

It’s a little hard after six months of quarantine and no singing to just suddenly feel such a flood of gratitude and memories about this experience of working with Julia and her clients at the Cancer Center. You know, she's a great listener, but also now I know a great speaker and she's good singer. I do want to say that I've worked in my with people with damaged voices or impaired voices. I've had the privilege of working with a couple of people with cancer, some people post-stroke, but this was my first time in a group setting and it was also my first time kind of being connected to such people as a complete stranger. Other times that I've had the chance to work with these people, they've come to me through a known connection and there's been a little bit of safety for them in jumping into the agreement to sing My main goal was to work on functional vocal exercises that would restore the autonomic reflexes in the vocal tract. These are things that we don't think about much unless we start to lose our speaking voice. The main thing is frustration and difficulty communicating feelings and thoughts to their loved ones and colleagues. This is one of the things with cancer treatment. It's such a shock to the system and a lot of the overt physiological elements of cancer treatment are exceedingly damaging to the vocal tract. On top of that, we had people in the group, some of whom had throat, cancer, lung cancer, Esophageal cancer and brain cancer. All of which were accompanied by surgeries which were extremely invasive, so you can begin to imagine the sorts of anxieties they had around their bodies and the frustrations from things they were in the in the middle of experiencing or had recently experienced. So I was pretty nervous about working with a mixed group. We had someone in the group who'd been singing all her life, and then a couple of professionals who came through one right on the heels of treatment for throat cancer and so we had others who had never opened their mouths to sing. That mixture really in a sense, helped the emotional tenor of the group. The levelling factor was cancer, so the desire to find something optimistic and forward moving and the desire not to dwell on anything negative or frustrating was important. So my challenge in setting the exercises was not to push them into that zone of fatigue and frustration, but to allow exercises that would enable their bodies to generate sound more effortlessly. I would say I had pretty good success rate and I certainly got some amazing feedback from people about sensations, of improved breathing, phonation, and developing a singing voice. I had one or two that I felt I couldn't help in the physiological sense, who week after week reported “wow, my voice still doesn't sustain itself”, but I think Julia touched on the communal benefits, the emotional benefits the pure joy we had. There was never any shame, never any sense that one should be improving. Even when you're singing without cancer, you have to take each day as it comes, because the voice is a mirror of so many things - what you've eaten, how much sleep you've had, your emotions, allergies in any number of things can affect the voice on a given day, so one must always take what's given to you on a given day and in that spirit, I led the group and encouraged them to be gentle in their judgements about the sounds they were making and how they were feeling. So it was a really a true privilege and I want to thank the Rotary for everything you did to support this endeavour.

Holly then read a couple of very heartfelt letters from a couple of the participants in the group.

 

In response to questions, Holly told us that the group hopes to resume once Covid restrictions are eased.  In the future a more distinct division between those only interested in the Monday night group and those wanting a collaboration with Melos will be pursued. They hope to continue performing at the Cancer Center as well because that was very satisfying to both the group and the patients.

 

The program received funding from several sources but both Julia and Holly are confident that funding for the group can be secured from various sources.

 

As said by one of our members, we can all be proud of the funding we provided for this great program.

 

Bill Egnatoff thanked Julia and Holly for a great presentation.