Artist and cancer survivor Diane Gregorie talks with cancer patient Carol Khole about her Bottles of Hope at Rhode Island Hospital.
Diane Gregoire peeks into one of the “pods” at the Comprehensive Cancer Center, pushing a cart loaded with boxes of polymer clay, beads, rhinestones, shells and empty medicine bottles, along with some of her own colorful creations.
She finds a woman attached to a chemotherapy drip, alone with a magazine. Gregoire explains that she’s an artist, and she comes in every week to make “Bottles of Hope” with the patients. “It’s a gesture of well-being,” she says, “and it passes the time away.”
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“You can either make your own or make one for a friend,” she says.
The patient, Carol Khole, of Pawtucket, is getting her first dose of chemo, and though she’s calmed down after a nerve-racking morning, she’s clearly eager for some cheer. “What would you like to make?” Gregoire asks. “We have animal, mineral, floral, we have dogs, cats…”
“I’ll do a dog,” Khole replies happily. “I have a dog.” His name is Sammy; he’s a golden retriever. And wouldn’t you know it: Gregoire happens to be carrying a bottle she made months ago decorated with a golden retriever, with a big flower for a cap.
“Let’s make your own, but I’ll also give you this one,” she says. Khole is delighted. “It looks just like Sammy!” Even the nose is right, a deep brown. Within minutes, she’s cutting and shaping little pieces of mustard-color clay to make another Sammy, for her bottle.
There’s a magic to the Bottles of Hope, Gregoire says, and you can see it. The concept is so simple: little medicine bottles wrapped in sheets of clay and decorated in all sorts of ways, goofy or artistic, made in hours or even minutes. Some are intricately beautiful, but that’s not the point. People connect with them, just as Khole lit up when she saw that golden retriever. “The way people see them,” she says. “The way people touch them.”
Gregoire started making her bottles five years ago, while she was undergoing chemotherapy at Women & Infants’ Hospital’s Breast Health Center. She would sit there for hours each week, having Taxol pumped into her body, and she noticed that the nurses kept discarding little empty bottles of heparin.
Gregoire saw a chance to make something beautiful. She asked if she could take some of the bottles, washed them out, then began decorating them, at home and at the hospital. She found time passed more quickly, and they seemed to make people cheerful.
She began decorating bottles with other patients, and got fellow members of the Southern Connecticut Polymer Clay Guild to make bottles for those too sick to make their own. They put notes with good wishes inside, and shared them with friends.
Through word-of-mouth, artist networks and the Internet, the idea spread across the country; there are now Web sites and a bulletin board devoted to the project. And at Rhode Island Hospital, Paula S. Most, director of art programs, enlisted Gregoire to go in and work with patients on a regular basis.
Every Wednesday at 10 a.m., Gregoire rolls in her cart and begins looking for takers. Sometimes the nurses let her know someone’s waiting – she’s got a reputation by now; people even change their appointments to catch her. Other times she just wanders around, making chitchat, a friendly and offbeat interruption to a dreary treatment day.
It’s so good, Most said, for patients “to meet someone upbeat, with a smile, that’s not a medical person.” With her messy blond-streaked hair, her informal clothes and her bright bottles, “she’s a real nice contrast to the person who comes in a white coat with a stethoscope.”
“Sometimes it’s just an icebreaker,” Gregoire said. “Some people are here alone, getting treatment, and then they’re laughing and talking.”
That’s clearly how Khole experienced the visit. She’s at the cancer center because she has a brain tumor; she’s already undergone three weeks of radiation, “which was a horror show.” She’d been told chemo was easier, but it was still terrifying. “I was a nervous wreck,” she said. “I was crying and everything.”
Her treating nurse, Claudia Massey, calmed her down, but it was Gregoire who got her chatting, who made her blue eyes brighten. She talked about Sammy, and her two children and two grandchildren, about working as a waitress near McCoy Stadium.
And she picked out the exact pattern she wanted for the lining of her bottle, a mix of purple, red and blue, squeezed into a thin sheet with an Atlas pasta maker. With the leftovers, she and Gregoire made a rose for the top.
In the waiting room, Gregoire met another patient, Theresa Biron, who’s finishing her chemo and was there just for a shot, but had brought back a bottle they made the week before Thanksgiving. Biron and one of her daughters had decorated it together: a turkey with a pointy rhinestone beak, rhinestone eyes and a pearl necklace, “Tina Turkey.”
“She started out to be a Tom Turkey, but then we decked her out,” Biron said with a chuckle. “We had a lot of fun. We took it home and we showed it to the entire family, and everybody enjoyed it. … I never expected to have so much fun over here.”
So was it hard to make Tina Turkey?
“It took two of us. It was very hard,” Biron replied very earnestly. She broke into a laugh. “That’s not true. All you need is a little craziness. And she is cute, isn’t she?”
For more information about the Bottles of Hope, go to www.scpcg.org or to www.bottlesofhope.org.
