It’s a funny thing: Suddenly everyone we know knows someone newly diagnosed with cancer. Maybe this was happening all around us before we entered cancerland, back when we were unscathed, back before we spoke the language. Back in the Old Country. Now somehow we’ve become greeters here. It seems that every week, we are welcoming new immigrants to this terrifyingly foreign, intimate land of hidden quicksand and sudden grace.
We aren’t very accomplished guides here. We just arrived ourselves last week. But that is how people survive in cancerland: we take one another’s hands, we show each other the places where, so far, the ground has borne us up. We describe the landscape so new immigrants don’t bump their shins quite so often in the dark.
It is in this spirit that I’m going to start compiling the little, pragmatic suggestions people have sent our way. I hope they will offer someone else a few stepping stones across the murky mire.
My aim here is simply to compile the tips people have offered us, and a few of our own, in one easy-to-find spot. For comprehensive information, there are tons of cancer resources out there: ask your doctor and your librarian for help finding solid sources.
So here you are: a few concrete suggestions people have shared with us, and a few things we’ve discovered:
Interacting with doctors and the medical system
We invite you all to comment with any suggestions you’ve learned along the way.
D