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The diagnosis

You look like a new person- hi there! Thanks for reading. This site is where I vent about having an invisible disability as well as cancer. Please consider sharing this post because it’s really helpful in my shift to a writing career. Welcome back! Please tell share this post or consider buying me a cup of coffee because it will help me continue to pay bills while I shift to a part time writing career.She nodded as she showed me the stack of papers. “Yes, this is lymphoma”. She was saying something else, and I saw her lips moving. I could hear myself answering. Inside I was thinking “this is what it’s like to be aware that you’re in shock.” I’d seen my labs. I’d Googled the shit out of my white blood cell counts, my lymphocyte levels. I had come to the conclusion that I either had CLL or SLL. I even had a running joke with myself that since this fatigue had a more serious cause than the chronic pain I was in, maybe a cancer diagnosis was enough to keep my relatives off my back, and their “helpful” suggestions to themselves. But the feeling of knowing your body was making something that could hurt or kill you? I’d had that feeling before. And it wasn’t a pleasant one. “… take your blood for some additional lab work. I’m a bit concerned that your condition might be more aggressive than we have the resources to treat here. If

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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

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