Evelyn from Oakland on Working with the MMFC

In September I got the opportunity to provide an afternoon of community acupuncture at the Milton Marks Neuro-Oncology Family Camp. Every year the organization puts on a weekend long family camp that provides childcare, therapeutic activities, body work, and fun to families who have children living at home with a parent who has a brain tumor. Brain tumors and the interventions to treat them can have drastic effects on a person, including alterations to personalities, decision making, and the ability to communicate, just to name a few. These potential changes add to the stress that all families with a sick caregiver must face. Milton Marks Family Camp was founded to provide families respite from the particular stresses they face.

One of the things that struck me the most about my time at camp was the sense of community. Many of the staff and volunteers I spoke to had been helping at camp for years. Everyone gave me the sense that while the weekend was very demanding and they were usually pretty tired by the end, they were also nourished and energized by it. Enough so that they came back year after year. Many folks were inspired to become part of the camp because they had a personal experience with brain cancer via a loved one, friend or colleague, but not everyone. Many were inspired to return year after year simply because they could see the good they were doing moment by moment: the laughter of kids, shared smiles between patients and their partners/caregivers, the shared tears and the sighs of relief released by families as they had the time to be present with each other in a community of people who understood what they were going through. That is a powerful thing, to be in a place where your struggles are intimately understood allows you to be free to acknowledge them, but also be able to step outside of them to occupy your full sense of self.

How deep this community ran didn’t really hit me until a few hours into my time there. The room I was providing acupuncture in was also the room that had the camp photos from years past. (More on the room later.) Community acupuncture was added to the weekend just a few weeks beforehand. I hadn’t gotten the full story of the camp’s history prior to my arrival and I learned what I think was the most important thing about it from looking at those photos. What I saw were families that had attended the camp for several years. A fact I had not previously been aware of. I saw kids grow up and families change over the course of the years. This was clearly a place that MEANT SOMETHING to these families, something big. Not that I ever doubted the value of the camp, but those photos encapsulated it. I felt lucky to be a part of something like that.

The icing on the cake of this already special time was that I got to fulfill a dream that I didn’t even know I had until it was happening. The room I was set up in also happened to be the natural history room of the facility. Half the space was dedicated to displays containing rocks, feathers, bones and taxidermy of local animals. While I was setting up my chairs on the other side of the room a couple of facilitators checked in with me about whether it felt weird to do acupuncture in a room with stuffed herons hanging from the ceiling and blond badgers showing us their teeth from the shelves…absolutely not, I assured them. In fact, I was delighted. Acupunks (people who dedicate themselves to community acupuncture) tend to be a bit weird, and this combination: nature, amateur museum, and healing space, created just enough weirdness to make me feel right at home. How could you not feel empowered to do good with this Ms. Marilyn watching over you?

If you would like to learn more about the Milton Marks Family Camp, to get involved, or donate you can find information here: https://www.miltonmarksfamilycamp.org/

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