How Not To Say The Wrong Thing To Someone Who Is Ill

Day 121

General status update

FEC cycle 6, day 6

Fatigue/weakness: continuing, but the other side effects are so bad today that I can’t do anything much, anyway, so it’s not really an issue.

Nausea demon: we had a 5am start, and he brought the Chemo Nano Rats with him- it’s Tormented Tuesday.

Anxiety level/insane euphoria (+/- 1-10,000): no longer anxious, just desperate, desperate DESPERATE for these last few days of torture to end.

Despair Demon: he’s out of the airing cupboard again, back here next  to me and whispering in my ear – he particularly likes the early hours before and after dawn, when I’m wracked with the nausea and toxic stomach, and there’s no one else around. He’s the voice of everything you ever did that has come back to haunt you, every failure, every way in which you have hurt and disappointed others, and he wants you to feel really bad about all those things. More than that, his aim is to kill hope - the thing with feathers – and convince you that there will be no good outcomes, that you are deluding yourself.

Chemo Muse: she’s agreed to give me today off as I worked hard yesterday, and because today I am in very poor shape indeed. I’ve asked her to take the Despair Demon out for the day, so I can keep my mind filled with good things, during what is going to be a very long and unpleasant day.

Chemo Brian: him, me, sofa, blanket, and a tab of Lorazepam- I’ve largely stayed off the sedatives during the worst days, but today I’m going to make an exception, because it’s still not 8am yet, and I have already been feeling like HELL for three hours now. Bring on a little benzo daze with Chemo Brian.

State of mind: the only good part of the day so far has been hearing a bird outside in the gardens, singing its little heart out, as I was grimly lining up all my meds on the table at 5am. It wasn’t a dawn chorus, it was just one bird, but it reminded me that hope IS the thing with feathers, and that this will soon be over, and that then I will be if not soaring, then at least swimming, away from all this. Splish, splash…

I’m feeling way too bad to write properly today, but there’s an article someone else has written that I’d like to share with you, as it’s the best piece I’ve ever read about what not to say to someone when they’re ill: it sums up exactly the entire problem of how some people make your illness about them, and add further stress to the nightmare that you’re trying to deal with.

Regular readers will remember that I suffered from a particularly egregious example of this early on in the chemotherapy treatment, at a point when I was at my very lowest ebb, and a close friend took it upon herself to write to me explaining how very difficult my illness was for her, how she was phobic about illness, couldn’t bear the fact that I was now all about the cancer, and therefore couldn't be around me until my treatment was all done, and how much she was suffering because I was no longer the old me and unavailable for jolly lunches like the one she had just had with another friend…

That email  upset me more than anything else anyone has said or done while I’ve been ill, and fighting for my life, and has simply obliterated what was once a close friendship. I should be a better person and rise above it, but my energies are needed for other things right now, and that’s the central point here; when you are dealing with a life-threatening illness, you do not have any energy to spare, and nor should you be expected to, for people who find your illness upsetting and insist on telling you about it. If you find your friend’s illness distressing, tell someone else about your feelings, not the person who is ill – you can only make them feel worse.

And that’s exactly what this article in the Los Angeles Times says, only much more eloquently, and with a truly excellent diagram. I commend it to you all.

How Not To Say The Wrong Thing To Someone Who Is Ill

Many thanks to my friend Dick Halsey, who brought this article to my attention yesterday after noticing how much it resonated with some of the posts on this blog.