BREWER, Maine – It was last December that the CancerCare of Maine program moved from a labyrinth of small rooms in the basement of Eastern Maine Medical Center into its expansive new home at the Lafayette Family Cancer Center on Whiting Hill.
On Thursday, medical officials, patients, donors and other guests mingled in the summer sunshine to tour the gardens surrounding the new facility and to celebrate the end of the two-year Champion the Cure fundraiser that supported the ambitious construction project.
There are five separate gardens at the cancer center, featuring native species and ornamentals plantings. Each offers a distinct landscape of flowers, grasses, shrubs and trees.
“This is really a thank-you for people who haven’t been able to see the benches and trees and gardens they donated, because they weren’t done,” said Allen L’Italien, executive director of CancerCare of Maine.
Guests were invited to tour the inside of the facility, including treatment areas.
The garden party also celebrated the naming of the facility’s glass-fronted atrium lobby for Elaine Pearson Dahl, the late wife of well-known Bangor pathologist Dr. Bernhoff Dahl. Elaine Dahl died in January after contracting an antibiotic-resistant infection. Dahl, who donated $750,000 to the cancer center in his wife’s memory, now is being treated there for prostate cancer.
“Elaine and I were blessed in being able to support the campaign for CancerCare of Maine, an institution which has and will provide up-to-date care for patients throughout Maine, and, by the way, for me, as well,” Dahl said in a prepared statement. Dahl characterized his cancer interventions to date as “a success,” but acknowl-edged that he continues in treatment.
According to Dahl’s personal and professional website, www.trionicsusa.com, Elaine Dahl was active and healthy until 2006, when she fractured her leg while working at the construction site of the couple’s home in Winterport. She underwent several surgeries to repair the damage.
In the spring of 2009, she developed a methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infection, or MRSA, at the operative site, “possibly related to an auto accident in mid-2008 and the continued presence of metal plates and screws in the leg,” according to the website. In July 2009 she underwent an amputation of the lower leg. After a protracted recovery, she died at a hospital near Detroit while on her way home to Maine from Florida.
Dahl said his wife was an enthusiastic promoter of the Champion the Cure fundraiser and served on the boards of many area nonprofit organizations, including Husson University, the Good Samaritan Agency and the Hampden Public Library.
L’Italien said Mainers, who suffer from some of the highest rates of cancer in the nation, continue to embrace a negative “mindset” when they hear the word. Too many, he said, resign themselves to death and choose to forgo treatment.
“The truth is, we’re curing most of our patients,” L’Italien said. Thanks to ongoing research and the availability of the latest treatment technology, he said, cancer is in many cases “a bump in the road of life.”
Even the most challenging forms of cancer may be successfully treated, L’Italien said, and even Mainers without insurance should seek care.
“All [cancer] patients deserve to have access to the latest in emerging technology and research,” he said, and CancerCare of Maine offers the most advanced treatment available.
