Bread, No Chocolate
The yeasty, warm aroma of freshly baked bread is one of
life's simple pleasures comforting and fragrant. It can fill a bare room with a
presence all its own, bringing with it a multitude of associations having to do
with home, with family and friends, and solace from life's storms. Bread often
called the staff of life is also a potent symbol of nourishment, the glue that
keeps body and soul together. To a cancer patient undergoing treatment in the
hospital, life can look mighty bleak. An antidepressant can sometimes improve
mental well-being, but that's adding one more pill to the already powerful mix of
drugs that many patients receive. Might something as simple as a loaf of fresh
bread a gift from their doctor nourish the spirit of those who are ailing?
Michael Nisenblatt, MD, a medical oncologist and clinical professor of medicine at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, says yes. He has been giving challahs a braided bread eaten by Jews at the Friday night meal to his hospitalized patients since 1994. Poor Jews in Eastern Europe ate dark bread all week but saved their money to buy white flour to make special loaves of a traditional egg bread for welcoming the Sabbath. It has become part of a ceremony of renewal that marks the end of a week's hard work.
Nisenblatt's first delivery came straight from his own dinner table to a patient with multiple myeloma, who had lost her will to fight after a particularly rough flare-up of her illness. She took heart from the gift and resumed her struggle against the disease. Because of her response, the doctor started buying a fresh challah every Friday for each of his hospitalized patients Jews and non-Jews alike.
In August 1996, he and Leon Kartzmer, a retiree whose wife had died of cancer in 1995, created the Challah Fund, which now delivers a fresh loaf every Friday to more than 50 patients undergoing cancer treatments at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital and St. Peter's Hospital in New Brunswick. Wally Milbrod, whose wife died of cancer in 1996, also assists in the "challah visits."
Why do they do it? "Because hope is hard to come by," says Nissenblatt. "It's slippery. It can fall through your fingers and through your words."
A short visit and a loaf of bread may not make it into the annals of cancer therapies. But there is high tech health care and low tech health care; and even doctors know that the low tech variety sometimes works better. Just ask their patients.