On Starting a Wellness Committee for your organization. Download pdf file below.
Diana Marshall
Diocese of Bethlehem Liaison to National Episcopal Health Ministries
With her knitting needles deftly working over a ball of gray alpaca yarn, the Rev. Laura Howell was thinking, and not just about the cancer patient who would don her downy cap miles away in Colorado.
(Back Left) Loraine Johnson, (Center) Gabriele Whittier and (Right) The Reverend Laura Howell knit caps for chemotherapy patients. The women are from Trinity Episcopal Church. (Photo by Denise Sanchez/The Morning Call Inc., / Copyrght 2009)
Howell also had her former co-workers at Lehigh Valley Hospice in mind.
As a hospice chaplain, she knew the joy it brought staff to present a
sick patient with any token of comfort, even something as simple as a
hand-knit cap to warm a head left bald and exposed by radiation.
''To give the staff something that makes people happy makes their job easier,'' she said.
Howell also knows the burden and rewards of caring for someone with
cancer; she's experienced it as both a chaplain and the daughter of a
cancer survivor. Her mother's battle with lymphoma in Colorado inspired
her ''chemo cap'' ministry here in the Lehigh Valley, where Howell is
the rector at Bethlehem's Trinity Episcopal Church.
