Advice For Coping With A Friends Cancer Diagnosis
If you find out one day that your friend has cancer, it may feel like you’ve totally been knocked off your feet. You don’t want your friend to go through an experience like that, and you don’t want to have to face it either. While the path ahead may be difficult, you must be prepared to be a positive force in your friend’s life. Continue reading for more information about advice for coping with a friend’s cancer diagnosis.
Your friend needs someone to be there for them at their side, helping them through these times. Listening to them is part of this. You have all these emotions swirling and might have plenty to say, but you need to really make sure you’re listening to your friend. They need a listening ear.
Make sure you’re not forgetting about your own needs and fears. You need to make sure you’re facing them. You will have to get help from others for this for sure. Seek out your loved ones for this.
You can help out your friend so much just by giving them assistance with the little tasks each day. Especially if they are going through treatments, you can help them by taking care of things. Some of these tasks you can even do without them knowing. This is a big help.
Sometimes your friend may need another person to accompany them to appointments, or you can just go with them to be extra support. Perhaps they’re getting treatments, and they need someone to drive them. Maybe they just want to talk with you or go out to lunch. You can definitely help make these times much easier for your friend.
You must be sure to laugh and act normal when you’re hanging around your friend. Sure, there will be those serious talks and trying times, but you have to make sure that you stay positive and act like everything is still the same despite the disease. It can sometimes feel as if there is an elephant in the room to you because of the overwhelming emotions and thoughts about the situation, but you have to do your best.
While you definitely want to be helpful to your friend and let them know how you feel, you don’t want to take it too far. This will be outside of normal as well. Of course you’re going to want to help them more, but you just don’t want to smother your friend. This is going to of course be too much, even though you’re trying to help. Consider what you can do for them, help them in every way you can, and make sure you give them some space. It can be hard when they have cancer to give them space because you want to be around them as often as possible, but you have to do this.
You need to do everything you can for your friend that has cancer. Use the advice you’ve just read to help you get started.