Prostate Man Chat Transcript

are. "See a need and fill it!" Please thank Lawrence for being a wonderful role model! Best regards, Elizabeth Craig

Comment from Cathy: Jane - great segment today. How does one go about discovering his or her life calling? I am 55 years old and about to be an empty nester and would love your advice on how to figure out what I should do next with my life.

Freedman: Hi Cathy—you’re at an ideal juncture to make this shift! There is a growing body of advice about how to think through this transition. I've got several thoughts. The first is to recognize that the next chapter may well last a decade or two, so it's worth investing in it up front, much the way young people do for their midlife careers. And it’s also normal, in my experience, for the early part of the change to have its ups and downs. My main counsel is to try on different routes, beyond just contemplating options. Volunteer, do an internship, enlist in a program like AmeriCorps or even something more exotic like the Peace Corps. These direct experiences are often the best guides to what is really a good fit!

Pauley: Cathy, I had a friend who went back to school. It was a certificate program not for an advanced degree, but to update her college undergraduate major. This certificate might not have qualified her for a paid position, but it qualified her to work for a nonprofit as a volunteer. Which she did so successfully, it built her own confidence to start another, completely unrelated project. And so signing up for that certificate program at a local college was a bridge that took her somewhere she would never have conceived of going.

Comment from Amy: Great suggestions, Jane and Marci. In interviewing adults I've found that many of them just started volunteering with their church at the prison or at the local homeless shelter and out of that they found their passion and their encore career.

Comment from Alice: I have recently opened the South Jersey branch of the Sandy Rollman Ovarian Cancer Foundation in memory of my daughter Maryalyce who passed away 5/07 from the horrific primary pertional cancer which is an off shoot of ovarian cancer. Most women have never heard of it. What can be done to get more information out about this disaster? The survival rate for PPC is 5% and for ovarian cancer stage 3 or 4 is 20. It is referred as “the cancer that whispers.” I want all women to Roar for a Cure.

Alboher: So sorry to hear about your loss. But it sounds like you are doing needed work around a disease which is not getting enough attention. One suggestion -- you've clearly got a lot of passion fueling you, why not start writing about your work and this under-reported off-shoot of ovarian cancer?  You could look into blogging or contributing op-eds to media outlets (a great resource here is the OpEd Project - www.theopedproject.org). Another approach is to contact reporters at local and national outlets (or even bloggers) who cover health issues and alert them to your work and the issues behind it.

Comment from Cathy: Jane - great segment today. What advice can you give someone who is trying to find their own "life calling" - someone in their 50s who is currently employed but may be looking to do something more meaningful? Mr. McRae certainly found his!

Pauley: Cathy, just an observation, Lawrence McRae found his “life calling” on the way back from a doctor's appointment when he was 65 and had not been looking for a life calling. It’s as if it found him.