By Juliana A. Torres
Staff Writer

The room of dressers, mirrors and seats lined with pillows and baskets serves a greater purpose than its cozy atmosphere portrays. It’s a dressing room, true, but also a room where cancer patients can regain their outward self-image.

“It’s just a little room where patients can come – cancer victims – to acquire any supplies that we have,” said Marianne Davitt, as she showed off the various items available in the first Cancer Resource Room to open in Osceola County. “We have wigs and hats and, uhm, breasts!”

Davitt, who runs the Health to You center where the resource room is located, pulled open a shallow drawer revealing several rows of prosthetic breasts. Across the room is a drawer of bras to complement them, below a drawer full of colorful head scarves. On top of the dressers and nightstands, wigs rest on mannequin heads. The room also offers ostomy bags and equipment, pillows that ease surgery soreness, T-shirts and information on local resources available to cancer patients.

The Osceola Regional Medical Center partnered with the American Cancer Society to start the resource room, which opened last month. The hospital’s Heath to You, or H2U, center, which is near the corner of John Young Parkway and Pleasant Hill Road, had extra room to host the resource room, Davitt said.

“Before we were open, people were coming to get stuff,” Davitt said.

She holds one of the several kinds of wigs available in the resource room. Wigs made of real human hair can cost thousands of dollars, but here, they’re available free to cancer patients.

“Everybody has been so pleased. They come in, they whip their scarves off and they’re bald, and they put these on and they’re like, ‘Oh my God!’ and they’re so happy,” Davitt said. “It’s very, very emotional and rewarding.”

Terrel Dennis, the chairwoman for Kissimmee’s Relay For Life this year, was the first to receive a donated wig, as she was donating two of her own wigs to the resource room.

“I really liked this one and they said I could have it,” she said. “I really have very little hair under there.”

Last January, Dennis was diagnosed with her third occurrence of breast cancer. Her third round battling the disease involved a lot more chemotherapy and radiation.

“This was the most difficult time that I’ve had,” she said. “They were much more aggressive with treatment. They wanted to make sure that they really got it this time.”

For cancer patients like herself, the resource room becomes more than a financial boost, especially for those who may not have health insurance or a family support system like Dennis said she has leaned on.

“When you lose your hair and your eyebrows and you’re going through chemotherapy, you’re pretty low,” she said. “I feel that once somebody goes in there, they come out with a different outlook, because now they can look normal again.”

The volunteers can help patients not only pick out resources, but help them style their new wig and show them how to wear it, show them how to put on makeup and measure them for the right bra for their new prosthetic breasts.

“There has never been anything here in Kissimmee,” Dennis said, explaining that before, local cancer patients had to drive to the American Cancer Society’s office in Orlando for the closest resource room. “So it’s very, very important that it’s down here now.”

Though the resource room has its own set of volunteers, Davitt said she has helped some of the patients with a wig or bra fitting. It was shocking, she said, to see her first bald head up close, but it doesn’t faze her now. On the other hand, sometimes clients want privacy.

“Some people don’t want you to see their scars. Other people wear them as badges of courage because of what they’ve gone through,” Davitt said.

Appointments aren’t required for a visit to the cancer resource room, at 1500A Village Oak Lane, Kissimmee. However, Davitt recommends calling ahead, given the odd hours and to ensure quick service and privacy. The phone number is 407-931-2222.