Oklahoma Woman Pays It Forward By Offering Free Spa Services To Cancer Patients

A Green Country woman has started a nonprofit that gives free spa services to people fighting cancer. She said it is her way of returning all the love and support she was shown when she was fighting breast cancer 12 years ago.

"If you can come in and set your mind at ease and relax, that helps you build strength to get to the healing, get past this, move forward," said Edie Tolbert.

When life gets too noisy, too loud, too chaotic you might need some breathing room, a chance to reset.

"You feel so out of control, not only with a cancer diagnosis but having to make quick decisions and with some aggressive cancers you don't even have time to stop and think," said Tolbert. 

Tolbert believes that self-care is a crucial part of working through life. She created Stonebrook Day Spa and Fitness Studio after winning her own battle against breast cancer.

"I felt like God was telling me, ‘I brought you through this so that you can be my vessel, be my tool," said Tolbert.

In order to bless people fighting cancer with free specialized massage therapy, yoga, support groups, the nonprofit The Stonebrook Project was born.

"Providing oncology massage therapy for people as they are going through treatment, it helps them to relax, it helps them to refocus, it helps with pain management, it helps with nausea," said Tolbert. 

There are about 250 cancer clients at the day spa alone and they are getting new clients every single day.

Joe Pike started going to the spa while he was fighting stage three colon cancer.

"We are normal people just going through a bad time," said Pike.

The support became a lifeline again a year after his last chemo treatment when doctors found stage four cancer in his liver.

"You have been beat from the inside out and then you go in there and get to lay on that bed and you just- everything goes away," said Pike.

Pike is cancer free now. In fact, this place is full of people who have found a strength inside of them, they didn't know was there, people who believe that when life feels a little too out of control, a little too hectic, a little too much, one of the best things you can do is slow down.

"It takes a village, it is not just me, it takes a village,” Tolbert said. “It is amazing to know the impact, that we are able to help as many people as we can.”  

To learn more about the nonprofit, The Stonebrook Project, visit the Facebook page here.  

To learn more and support the day spa or start looking into spa services at Stonebrook Day Spa and Fitness Studio, visit the website here.