“Diagnosed with prostate cancer and new to Regina, I was looking for ways to build my courage, resolve and to deal with anxiety. Through my attendance for nearly three years in Bonnie Chapman’s Creativity for Health Program I learned many valuable skills in addition to expressing myself (actually losing myself) through art including guided meditation, relaxation, and stress management while enjoying contact with other cancer patients in a supportive, ‘healing’ environment. The effects were profound.
For most of us cancer patients the journey is not one filled with compassion or empathy; it is filled with technical information and decision-making, often under the most stressful, time pressured, conditions. Creativity for Health is a light shining through the dark clouds, innovative, refreshing and rejuvenating; it offers a safe harbor from what can be tsunami waves from the effects of cancer and its treatment. Bonnie Chapman is an extraordinarily gifted person and I have no hesitation in saying that can be quickly verified by talking to past and present participants, family members, social workers, support staff, pediatrics, palliative care, doctors and nurses in the Allan Blair Cancer Clinic. Bonnie Chapman is a ‘hero’, a remarkable person indeed worthy of the provincial Order of Merit and Order of Canada.”
R. A. M.