A Conversation with Grace Adamson

Abstract

AbstractGrace's skills as a workshop leader span 27 years. She has presented workshops and lectures on supportive care for cancer patients and their families all over the world. Australian by birth, Grace's experience as a carer of her partner diagnosed with bone cancer in 1974 was the inspiration for her work. 1976 saw her partner with extensive secondary cancer and given a two‐week prognosis. Following his remission in 1978, she trained and qualified as a health professional specialising in natural therapies, counselling, supportive care and many other modalities.She co‐founded Australia's first Cancer Support Group movement in the early eighties. Grace has now worked with more than 10,000 people as they have searched for life meaning, quality of life, and to use their illness as a positive turning point in their lives.Grace's work imparts the wisdom of life and professional experience thus helping people to live well with cancer. Her work with women with breast cancer resulted in the best selling book “Women of Silence: The Emotional Healing of Breast Cancer” (1994).After dealing with separation and divorce in 1997, Grace began her own experience with an acquired, and at times life threatening, condition which resulted from routine surgery. Having experienced this life altering condition, which included ileostomies and colostomies, Grace teaches from a base of deep personal experience in how to effectively harness H.O.P.E ‐finding hope, seeking options, being practical and being empowered. She has four children between the ages of nineteen and twenty‐four and has recently been happily remarried.Ruth Benor, a member of the editorial board, recorded this conversation in January 2003. Copyright © 2003 Whurr Publishers Ltd.