Writing Your Way Through Cancer, Part II: Sharing Your News

Telling people that I had cancer was one of the hardest parts of the experience.  We had moved a thousand miles away from family and friends just a few months before my diagnosis, so most of time I shared the news in a phone call.

The calls were difficult.  Most people hadn't even known that I was having a biopsy, and now I was interrupting them in the middle of making dinner or helping the kids with their homework to say that I had inflammatory breast cancer.  With each call, I had to decide how much to share about my poor prognosis and the seriousness of inflammatory breast cancer.  For the most part, my friends and family came through in wonderfully supportive ways, but I soon realized that I needed a better way to let people know about what was happening.

Group emails turned out to have tremendous advantages for communicating.  I could write when I had enough physical energy.  It gave me time to decide exactly how much information to share.  When the news was bad, I could stop to cry while writing without upsetting the recipient.  The very act of writing helped me sort out my emotions.  Having to explain what the doctor had told me helped me understand it better myself.

Writing helped my friends too.  They were opening those emails when they had time to concentrate on what I was saying and could think before replying.   The responses were a beautiful quilt reflecting each person's strengths.   I have a stack of the emails and regular mail that poured in over the course of my treatment.  Cards and letters filled our mailbox.  Some people sent books or information; others offered their prayers and put me on their congregational prayer lists; some were incredibly good at reading between the lines in my emails and responding empathetically.

A work colleague from my previous place of employment turned out to be particularly helpful with empathy.  A young man with no cancer experience, he wrote, "In response to news like yours, . . . we have three choices: 1) ignore it because we don't know what to say . . . 2) offer cliches, or 3) be vulnerable and speak from the heart."

Over the course of several emails, we shared experiences.  I wrote to him, "I'm fortunate to have people like you in the third category ("vulnerable and speak from the heart") who really do respond not just to information, but to the feelings underneath. . . . I find that empathy doesn't mean having the same experience.  No one ever will have the exact same combination of factors I have.  Your empathetic imagination does make me feel less alone.  Thank you."

To someone else I compared my fear to a huge, mushroom-like blob.  "Each time I write you, I feel like I've broken off a piece of that fear and given it away.  Thank you for holding a piece of my fear for me."

Since my diagnosis, new tools for sharing news during a serious illness have been developed.  Many people now use CaringBridge, Facebook, or personal blog websites like Blogger or WordPress the way I used the group emails.  Our own Cancer Vixen is trying out Twitter.   CaringBridge is a non-profit site specifically for families dealing with serious illness and will offer you more privacy.