By Neil Offen

noffen@heraldsun.colm; 419-6646

DURHAM -- Five women sit around a blond-wood oval table intricately weaving strips of colored paper into what will become dangling "Carolina Snow Flakes." On the table there is also a black beeper.

When it goes off, red lights flashing, Jill King will get up from the table, leave her strips of paper, and get her chemotherapy.

The table is in the waiting area just outside Clinic 1-A at the Morris Cancer Center in Duke Hospital. The women are cancer patients, spending, sometimes, an entire day at the clinic, shuffling back and forth from doctor to lab to chemotherapy to still another doctor.

The weaving -- and the origami, paper flowers and other art projects they do, organized by the Duke Cancer Patient Support Program -- is respite from the grueling rounds of fighting disease.

"When you're here, it's stressful, there's a lot of anxiety, you have a lot on your mind," said Prudence Dawson, a Duke cancer patient sitting at the table. "This gets your mind off it."

The art projects have been remarkably successful helping patients get their minds off the reason they have come to the cancer clinic.

Most successful has been the support program's project to fold 1,000 paper cranes by June for National Cancer Survivors Day. Launched last May, the idea was inspired by the story of the young Japanese girl who developed leukemia as a result of radiation from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

While in the hospital, the girl's best friend brought a piece of golden paper to her room and folded it into a crane. The crane symbolized an ancient Japanese legend that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted a wish.

The cancer support program put together kits for patients to fold cranes when they came for their appointments and treatments.

"The main reason was to give them something to do while waiting in the hospital," said Phillip Shoe, coordinator of volunteer services at the program. "It was also a way for them to express their wishes, hopes and prayers, and build community between them. While doing this, they can help each other out, start a conversation, get to know each other, find that they're not alone."

The small pieces of paper, in a bursting rainbow of colors and shapes, soon were everywhere in the waiting rooms and on the hospital units of the clinic. The original 1,000 goal was reached very quickly. There are now more than 2,500 cranes and still more are coming in -- from patients, friends and families, from school and civic groups.

The support program, in fact, is still accepting wrapping paper donations for crane folding.

Claire Weinberg, diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008, was a patient when the crane project started.

"Sometimes there just aren't words. When you get the diagnosis, words just don't come to you," Weinberg said. "This was beyond anything I'd every experienced and you need a way to get the emotions out. Anything that allows someone going through a cancer journey to express themselves is just a gift. And what a beautiful gift this was."

Working on the project gave her hope, she said, changed her perspective.

"It helped me put a positive twist on what I was going through," Weinberg explained. "It was the ultimate turning, taking something so ugly and devastating as cancer and making it into a gift."

Dawson jokingly calls the arts and craft project such as the paper cranes "Camp Chemo."

"It's a lot more fun to sit here and do this," she said, looking up briefly from her Carolina snow flake and her friendly conversational chatter with the other women around the oval table. "It helps you forget that you've got cancer. It helps you remember that you still have a life."