i tried to cancer ditch my mom a little. dad had to yell at me at two o'clock in the morning in a doorway before i finally started getting my shit together. i mean, i'd only just turned 19 and there's a host of complications that go along with girl > breast cancer > mother, but looking back i am very much not proud of my initial reactions to that.
a year later this guy i had a thing for my first couple years at the junior college called me and a few of his other friends so he could talk to us about having been recently diagnosed with throat cancer. that got weird. i think the first peer-group friend is for everybody. i didn't push away. i don't exactly remember how i responded, but it still feels wince-y to me for some reason and i'm clearly blocking something about it. maybe just because it's painful. i do remember sitting with him, sketching out ideas for hats and scarves for once the chemo started. i also have a distinct memory of "near wild heaven" coming on the radio on the way home that night and needing to pull off the expressway so i could stare at my steering wheel.
cancer is terrifying and there's not really anything most people around you can do in dealing with the primary source of the fear - a situation we've been strongly conditioned to NEVER tolerate, even though we deal with them unacknowledged a hundred thousand times over the course of a day. so responding to it is one of those things we need to teach ourselves, but there aren't a lot of low-stakes opportunities for practice. most books and movies get a lot of stuff wrong (as i'm sure you've seen in your editing work) so you can't get a feel for the footing that way, either. but honestly, most of it boils down to a) listen, b) care, and c) don't try to distract, diffuse or redirect attention away from what the patient wants to talk about. which is great to say, but in the moment as the person who is finding this out about something else? ush. trust me. it's hard even when you've been there personally.
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Date: 2015-11-19 08:57 pm (UTC)a year later this guy i had a thing for my first couple years at the junior college called me and a few of his other friends so he could talk to us about having been recently diagnosed with throat cancer. that got weird. i think the first peer-group friend is for everybody. i didn't push away. i don't exactly remember how i responded, but it still feels wince-y to me for some reason and i'm clearly blocking something about it. maybe just because it's painful. i do remember sitting with him, sketching out ideas for hats and scarves for once the chemo started. i also have a distinct memory of "near wild heaven" coming on the radio on the way home that night and needing to pull off the expressway so i could stare at my steering wheel.
cancer is terrifying and there's not really anything most people around you can do in dealing with the primary source of the fear - a situation we've been strongly conditioned to NEVER tolerate, even though we deal with them unacknowledged a hundred thousand times over the course of a day. so responding to it is one of those things we need to teach ourselves, but there aren't a lot of low-stakes opportunities for practice. most books and movies get a lot of stuff wrong (as i'm sure you've seen in your editing work) so you can't get a feel for the footing that way, either. but honestly, most of it boils down to a) listen, b) care, and c) don't try to distract, diffuse or redirect attention away from what the patient wants to talk about. which is great to say, but in the moment as the person who is finding this out about something else? ush. trust me. it's hard even when you've been there personally.
also, thank you.