Spiritual care coordinator brings prayer, hope to cancer patients

By KARA KOCZUR, Globe staff reporter
May 29, 2008

It's Friday morning as Sister Janet Schumacher passes through the chemotherapy area at the June E. Nylen Cancer Center in Sioux City.

With a smile on her face, the cancer center's spiritual care coordinator tells patients and their family or friends "Good morning!" and asks, "How are you?"

Not only do many respond to the question, but they ask, "How are you?" back. It's something that astounds Sister Schumacher.

"Even in the midst of their struggle. . .they're still focused on the other," she said. "It's a complete grace of God for me."

Sister Schumacher has been the spiritual care coordinator, or chaplain, of the Nylen Cancer Center for the past five years. Her job at the cancer center is to provide spiritual and emotional support for cancer patients and their families.

Daily routine

She begins each day the same way, by picking up the patient list and by gathering any requests for spiritual care. Sister Schumacher then goes through the list, praying for each patient.

"I like to pray by name for each patient," she said. "Prayer is so foundational."

With a marker she highlights the new patients, those who may need follow-up visits and those who have been referred by doctors or nurses. She sees the patients either by making rounds or by their request. Many times she is stopped in the hallway by people asking for prayers and spiritual care, she said.

"Just the other day a dear lady came and stopped me in the hallway and said, 'Are you Sister so-and-so?' I said, 'yes,'" Sister Schumacher recalled. "Tears started coming down her cheeks and she said, 'I don't know what to do. My husband has cancer again and he isn't getting any better.'"

The biggest struggle Sister Schumacher said the patients have is what she refers to as the "meaning question."

"A lot them [ask] "What's this all about? I don't understand. Why is this happening to me?" she said.

Inspiration

Sister Schumacher, a Presentation Sister of 47 years, is familiar with cancer and the effect it can have on family members. Her mother had colon cancer, and a few months before she died in 1982, her father was also diagnosed with the early stages of cancer.

Her desire to work with cancer patients stemmed from her mother's battle with the disease.

"She was such an inspiration to me," she said in her soft-spoken voice. "In the back of my mind I thought, 'Someday I want to work with cancer patients.'"

Twenty-two years later, after teaching at a grade school, working in campus ministry at Loyola University in Chicago and coordinating retreats, that dream came true. The cancer center's former chaplain, overwhelmed by work at the center and at her second job at the hospital, asked Sister Schumacher if she would be willing to apply for the position.

Peace instantly flowed through her, Sister Schumacher said, and she knew that it was where she was supposed to be.

Sister Schumacher believes she helps the patients most by listening, praying for their needs and reflecting back to them how God speaks through them.

Needed ministry

Mary Jane Fitch, the resource and community education coordinator at the center, will often refer patients to Sister Schumacher and they run the general and leukemia lymphoma cancer support group together.

Sister Schumacher's ministry is very much needed at the cancer center, Fitch said.

"She gives [patients] reassurance and comfort," said Fitch, who has been at the center since before it opened in 1995. "She is very compassionate and caring. Whether [the patients] have bad news or not, she's always there for them and helps them on their journey."

They teach her

Although Sister Schumacher ministers to the patients by doing small things called "spirit lifters," passing out support literature on issues such as grief, living with cancer, helping kids deal with cancer and more, working with hospice and planning a memorial service twice a year, she stressed that the patients give her way more in return.

"I feel that the patients and families are such an inspiration to me and the staff by their courage and gratitude for blessings that we normally take for granted," she said. "They have so much to teach us as a society about what's really important in life: faith and family."

Sister Schumacher takes inspiring words of wisdom from past patients, such as "Fear not to trust an unknown future to a known God," and puts them on posters hung in the center, hoping that current patients will find them inspiring as well.

She even finds their words inspiring to herself. She recalled one lady who not only had cancer, but was raising her two teenage grandchildren also. The lady would quote her Russian grandmother by saying, "Thank you God for this much."

"I still have the prayer right here," she said, pulling a yellow sticky note from amidst funeral announcements on a bulletin board near her desk. "I need to remember that."

People will ask her if it's depressing to work at the cancer center, Sister Schumacher said, to which she replies that after five years she's not depressed yet.

"I feel mostly inspired," she added. "I'm not saying I don't feel sad, [but] sad is an emotion, depression is getting stuck in that."