The University of Rochester Medicine Kessler Trauma Center hosted it’s second picnic in celebration of trauma survivors and brought them together to share their experiences.

The trauma center works to save lives, but those there also believe it’s more than that.

“But what’s equally important is that they return to their life,” said Nicole Stassen, a professor of surgery and trauma surgeon at Strong Memorial Hospital. “That they don’t just live or that they’re not just alive. That they actually live. And that’s what events like these celebrate.”

Survivors like Elise Gaudino, who was diagnosed with grade 4 glioblastoma multiform in 2010, a fast-growing and aggressive brain tumor.

“My oncology team gave me one or two years to live but it’s now 2023, so it’s been 13 years,” Gaudino said.

Gaudino has been a dance teacher for 35 years and she says she wasn’t going to let her cancer get in the way of that.

“At first I thought, ‘Oh no, I can’t teach dance anymore,’ but I didn’t stop,” she said. “I was teaching dance a week after my first surgery, my first brain surgery.”

The picnic celebrates these survivors by bringing them together to share and recognize their experiences.

“We can tell them you are going to eventually walk again, and you’re going to go back to work and you’re going to do all these things, but hearing it from somebody who’s been there is just different,” said Stassen.

And it also reminds them how far they’ve come.

“Unfortunately we pretty much meet everybody on the worst day they’ve ever had in their life, for them and their families,” Stassen said. “And if we can help them get through that, then our job is done. Well, our job is started.”

“I didn’t realize how strong I was until I started going through the experience,” Gaudino said. “I just thought I was going to die when I first got the news that I had brain cancer. But I had a lot of reassurance from my oncology team. They said, ‘No no no, you’re going to get through this because of where the tumor was.’ And because I was young and because I was healthy enough.”

And now survivors like Gaudino can pass that strength on to others.

“When my dancers would say, ‘Oh I’m too tired to do this or that,’ and I would say, ‘Hey, I kept teaching you all during chemo, all during radiation, so get up and do it again,’” Gaudino said.