My advice for how to tell people you have cancer
So all joking aside, I couldn’t think of how to break this news and nothing I found on Google really satisfied me. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no right way, because each person is going to be different. Can I tell people over text? Should I ask them to come over, go to where they are? Is telling people you don’t see on a regular basis, or for distance reasons, better on the phone? Don’t some people hate talking on the phone period? When do you tell work friends vs people you work with? DO you tell people you work with? Do you post it to Facebook? Or can you just start talking about it on Facebook as if everyone you know is supposed to already know? What if you forget to tell someone or think they already know and they end up finding out from your Facebook post? It was driving me crazy, so honestly I dispensed with the etiquette, stopped looking for rules, and just started telling people. When This is actually the most important consideration, I think. If you tell people during the “let’s rule cancer out” stage, you worry people needlessly. That doesn’t mean bear it alone. I told one family member, waited until the diagnosis visit with the hematologist, and invited my mother to the big reveal. For close family, when you get the general diagnosis that it is cancer of a certain classification, there’s no need to wait for the specific
