Pink Pillow Project offers help to breast cancer patients

The emails and letters come in from all across the country, and throughout the world.

“How thoughtful of you to comfort me during this journey. Your thoughtfulness fills my heart,” one woman wrote.

“A small joy in making an otherwise sleepless night more restful,” wrote another.

“I LOVE my pillow!” said a third woman. “I can’t live without it.”

These women are talking about a little pink pillow they received via the Pink Pillow Project, a charity co-founded by UB staff member Nancy Kielar to help them and hundreds of other women in their recovery from breast cancer surgery.

“It’s just a pillow, but it’s the right pillow at the right time when you need it,” says Kielar, assistant vice president in the VP/Chief Information Office and a two-time breast cancer survivor.

Kielar spends her nights and weekends working with the Pink Pillow Project, which provides pink, microbead pillows free of charge to women who are undergoing breast cancer surgery to help ease the discomfort associated with the surgery. The pillows are distributed mainly through local hospitals, including Millard Fillmore Suburban, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Sisters Hospital and Mount St. Mary’s Hospital in Lewiston, as well as by surgeons who work with Windsong Radiology.

Kielar and her co-founder and friend Lisa Smith also send pillows to women who contact them directly through the Pink Pillow Project website. Kielar says she’s received requests from women from across the country and as far away as England and New Zealand. The charity has given away more than 800 pillows since it began its work in December 2013.

Kielar knows well from her first surgery in 2001 the discomfort women experience when lymph nodes are removed from their armpits during surgery. “The incision is pretty tender and if they’re taking your lymph nodes out, the incision under your armpit in very awkward,” she says, noting that it hurts even to put your arm down by your side.

Different organizations offer pillows to patients to ease this universal problem, she says. But “I felt like Goldilocks: one was rock-hard; the second one was just too darn soft,” she recalls. As she scoured her house looking for a cushion that would provide some relief, she found a microbead pillow, shaped like a Tootsie Roll.

“It was just right” to cushion her arm while sitting and sleeping, she says. “It conforms to whatever shape you need. I just found this pillow invaluable.”

Kielar says she began giving similar pillows to women she knew who were diagnosed with breast cancer.

“Presurgery, I’d give one to people and they’d open it up and say, ‘oh it’s a pillow. Thanks.’ And afterward, they’d call me and say, ‘oh this is the perfect thing.’” Many women, she adds, also use the pillow to cushion their arms during chemotherapy.

One night she was having dinner with Smith, who had lost her mother to breast cancer in 1989. Kielar related her pillow stories and Smith suggested they hand out pillows on a larger scale “to touch more women.”

Smith is a partner in Phillips Lytle LLP, and the law firm took care of all the legal work necessary to incorporate the Pink Pillow Project as a nonprofit 501c3.

The project is run strictly by volunteers and is funded exclusively with donations. It is among the charities listed on the United Way of Buffalo and Erie County’s general campaign form (Code 5863). Those wishing to support the project also may donate directly via the website. All donations are tax-deductible.

“We’re just trying to help people,” Kielar says. “At that point in your life when you’re scared, you have this diagnosis, you don’t know what the future brings and you’re in pain, to get a pillow, to know that someone has been there before you and just wants to help is a nice thing.”

The responses she’s gotten from recipients has been gratifying, she says, pointing in particular to a letter she received from the husband of a Roswell patient a week after his wife died.

“He said that the only thing that provided her any comfort at the end was her pillow,” Kielar says.