Speaker 1:           I had a level three brain tumor. I was diagnosed in December and had it removed on the 5th of January this year. I had a radiotherapy and chemotherapy basically wanted to get back active. Previously had a gym membership and realized very quickly that would not be able to go back to the gym unsupervised being on medication, elevated heart rate and so many issues around that. So yeah, coming to Lift was a really good option.

Speaker 2:           Supportive care in cancer is absolutely fundamental to cancer care. Years ago we used to think that cancer care was all about just treating the tumor and gradually over the years it became blindingly obvious that treating cancer involves so much more than just treating the tumor. It involves looking after the person who has the cancer. And we now talk about supportive care being what makes excellent cancer care possible. Supportive care is the management of the symptoms of cancer and its treatment.

Speaker 3:           My cancer diagnosis has visited me twice. The first time I was 33. It involved quite an invasive breast carcinoma and unfortunately breast cancer revisited me at 61 last year. What I know now is the second time around, again, high grade invasive carcinoma. I was in the position of having to decide what level of surgery I required and with really good specialist input, I guess I decided that a double mastectomy was pretty straight forward in the end.

Speaker 3:           What I know now about being involved in this Lift program is I actually didn't do that well the first time round post-treatment recovery and this program allows me to take some really good opportunities to prioritize health, to really be clear about what my health goals are and be really committed to those.

Speaker 4:           The majority of my patients who are having chemotherapy have side effects which are specific to certain drugs, but nearly every patient's receiving [inaudible 00:02:26] cancer treatment has as a dominant side effect fatigue and the most effective way of resolving this fatigue and improving wellbeing is through regular exercise.

Speaker 1:           Chemotherapy treatment makes me feel very nauseous and yeah, I guess I'm not getting the antinausea things right. I was very depleted and yeah, almost a passed out through just total lack of energy. So at that point I realized if I was in a gym anywhere else, that just would not have ended.

Speaker 4:           One of the tremendous advantages of exercise, especially for certain patients, subgroups, such as prostate cancer, for example, is that the profound fatigue that they might experience as a consequence of their. disease, but also as a consequence of their treatment can be alleviated by well-structured, regular programmed exercise.

Speaker 3:           You know what I've learned over the two occasions is the commonality is fatigue. At a very high level.

Speaker 2:           It's reasonably easy to have a whole lot of siloed practitioners caring for a bit of the patient, but the problem with that is that the patient feels neglected or unhappy because nothing's joined up. We talk about joined up care now, how we accompany the patient on that journey, that supportive care almost takes the person by the hand and leads them, accompanies them, on a well coordinated journey without great big chasms in the road.

Speaker 1:           Outside of here, everyone's so clinical and not very subtle with things and the psychology is such an important thing about the ups and downs. I've just described this thing as a roller coaster to everyone and I guess the peaks and troughs are all around psychology and, and coming here was such a leveling experience I guess. It's, yeah, I've never gone away from here feeling worse than I've arrived. It's always been such a good, good thing.

Speaker 2:           Across the world. People are doing more and more studies showing that exercise is more and more important. In fact, we probably should prescribe exercise in the same way that we prescribe drugs. And I'm sometimes tempted to actually watch a prescription and says, please, please take a walk every day for half an hour. But of course people can't always do that. And unless we help them with their exercise programs and encourage them to do exercise, we're not actually optimizing their health.

Speaker 4:           Exercise is an essential part of medicine because exercise improves survival in many cancer subgroups.

Speaker 3:           All of the supportive care treatments are cost effective because they would use the morbidity burden and the disability burden for the surviving cancer patient. It would be shortsighted not to actually reinvest funding in keeping people well and keeping them out of hospital, but within cancer, I think there's this extra burden that we know that patients who don't exercise, and patients that don't get looked after properly, don't actually recover and then become a burden on the cost of the society.

Speaker 3:           I guess at the end of the day, cancer actually, or any chronic illness or acute illness can really hit your finances hard as well. You can be a bit aghast when you get get to have a scan that costs you 250 bucks out of pocket and some specialists charge above Medicare rates, too, to that same sort of degree. Therefore, by having medical benefits over the last thirty years allows me to be here in the Lift program without being financially embarrassed.

Speaker 2:           And as we often say to people curing a cancer, but killing the person is an absolute disaster. But another disaster is curing the cancer and having a person left with disability or morbidity from either the cancer or the treatment.