I’m having dinner with an old friend tonight. If our reservation had been for last night I would have had to cancel because… well, this. But today I feel great and I’m looking forward to seeing him and to having dinner in a restaurant we both love (Crossroads), fingers crossed that I can taste something. Danny lives in New York and, for no particular reason, I haven’t told him about my diagnosis and treatment yet. I know I have to tonight. Bad way to start a dinner… sure-fire way to put a damper on dessert.
Would you believe the NY Times published a “how to” last week— as in how to tell someone you have cancer!
“Ask yourself, ‘Who is a need-to-know, and who might I tell later?’” [oncology social worker Stephanie] Alonso said. Once the news is out there, you can’t pull it back, she added. “There are many times where I hear people say, ‘I told all these people. And now I’m being just flooded with people checking in on me.’”
If you’re announcing your illness to a group, Kaufman recommended using CaringBridge, a free nonprofit health platform that helps you communicate updates and simplify care coordination. “The exhaustion of telling the same thing over and over again is real,” she explained.
If you’re making a group announcement, [Crushing the Cancer Curveball author Joelle] Kaufman added, specify what you need— and what you don’t. Some people whom Kaufman shared her diagnosis with wanted to help but had no idea what to do, she said, so she issued requests like dropping off meals or driving her to appointments.
As for what Kaufman didn’t want: pity, links to random articles, or stories about other people’s cancers, “like the person’s aunt that had cancer 30 years ago.”
Someone who heard about my diagnosis through the grapevine e-mailed me yesterday: “I'm going out of town for a bit and would like to talk to you. I'm obviously concerned and want to see if there's anything I can do to help you. Please let me know a good time I can call you this week.” He calls every night and never has anything to say; I just don’t pick up the phone more than once a week. If I had the energy for nightly small talk at this point, maybe I’d be running for office. Like I said, I was feeling shitty yesterday and I e-mailed back an unkind note that if he was asking what he could do for me, he should put it in the form a multiple choice (rather than just an amorphous “anything.”)
Luckily for me, Roland is there to take care of whatever I can’t do. And when he needs a breather, someone else takes over— my sister this month, my friends Michael and Helen next month. I’m still able to go out for dinner towards the end of the week (so as far from the Friday infusions as I can get) and my dance card is pretty full. Roland insists I keep everything as “normal” as I can for as long as I can, especially since at some point I probably won’t be able to. If it was up to him, I wouldn’t have told anyone; he’s super-private.
Other than posting it on my blog and Facebook for anyone who knows me to read, I only tell people when it comes up naturally. Even if “naturally” is just a perfunctory “how are you,” to which I usually answer “dying” and then don’t respond if they laugh and move on with the conversation. But I get the feeling when someone wants to know and can handle it and I can ease into it without causing any hysteria.
One thing that shocked me this time around— something I didn’t experience with my first cancer treatments a decade ago— is that a small number of friends just can’t handle it at all and sort of ease away and distance themselves. There aren’t many and I don’t blame anyone. But what I really do dislike is when someone gets all weepy. That may help them in some way but it’s totally a bummer for me. Honestly, I’ve stopped trying to guess how people will react. Some show up in ways I never expected and some hover awkwardly, unsure what to do. I get it. But at the end of the day, cancer doesn’t turn me into someone else— it just forces the people around me to decide how much of me they can handle. And honestly? There’s no right way to handle this— for them or for me. It feels to me like we’re all just figuring it out as we go.
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