Help Me Live, Revised: 20 Things People with Cancer Want You to Know - Softcover

Hope, Lori

 
9781587611490: Help Me Live, Revised: 20 Things People with Cancer Want You to Know
Softcover
ISBN 10: 158761149X ISBN 13: 9781587611490
Verlag: Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Almost all of us know someone with cancer.
 
And, of course, we want nothing more than to offer comfort and support, and foster hope. But we don’t always know how—and may feel uncomfortable asking. Following her own treatment for cancer, Lori Hope created a survey for cancer survivors addressing issues they wanted their families, friends, and caregivers to understand. The results of the newly expanded survey are presented with honesty, insight, and humor, and complemented by scores of compelling personal stories from survivors of diverse ages and backgrounds.
 
If you are a caregiver, Help Me Live will help you communicate more effectively and respond more compassionately. And if you are a survivor, it will help you feel validated, empowered, and, ultimately, hopeful.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lori Hope is a journalist, Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, and speaker. A tireless advocate for those struggling with the social and interpersonal challenges that come with cancer, she has served on the board of the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation, has volunteered for The Lung Cancer Alliance and the National Lung Cancer Partnership, and has spoken before the American Cancer Society, the Oncology Nursing Society, and Tulane Medical School. Her commitment to cancer survivors will continue until this book is no longer needed. Visit www.lorihope.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

introduction
 
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other? —George Eliot
 
I AWAKEN IN MY DORMITORY-SIZE room and can hardly wait to peek outside at the young, thin-limbed maple tree silhouetted against the 6 a.m. lilac-gray sky. What a thrill to be on my own, poised to finish the final chapter of this book, a book about cancer. No, a book about hope—about listening—about being there.
 
On a private writing retreat at a wooded monastery in northwest Washington, named for St. Placid, a monk rescued from drowning by a fellow monk, I feel happier than I can remember. Having survived cancer, I just returned from Cancer as a Turning Point, a free conference that freshened my heart with hope. My nineteen-year-old son, Brett, recently called my cell phone to ask if I know anyone who needs a newspaper subscription which he wants to purchase out of compassion for the salesman outside Safeway. And, finally, my husband left a voicemail saying with love rich as fudge, “I miss you so much.” It doesn’t get much better than this.
 
As I move through the hallway in my slippers, I step gingerly to avoid disturbing the other retreatants sleeping behind doors labeled for Benedictines such as Heloise and Hrotsvit of Gandersheim. In the fluorescent-lit communal kitchen that still smells of popcorn from the night before, I turn a stainless steel knob next to the faucet, pumping 190-degree water into a plastic cone to brew my go-juice, and leave the kitchen, quietly shutting the door behind me.
 
Laptop cradled tightly against my left ribs—ribs split apart two years ago so a lobe of my lung could be removed—I walk through the propped-open door labeled, “Parlor,” eight feet across the hall from Hadewijch, named for the Benedictine who coined “Love conquers all things.” I gently place my computer on the loveseat and bend to lift the brass doorstop. I close the door so I can rustle papers, tap the keyboard, and talk to myself without disturbing the man in Hadewijch, an egg-shaped man with silver eyebrows and plaid shirt, a Leprechaun-lumberjack hybrid who told me the night before that he recently lost his wife of fifty years. Five decades. Can you imagine?
 
Safe in the well-insulated parlor, my fingers type with impunity. Deep in thought, calm and focused, a loud KAPLUNK! shoots my pulse from 60 to 100. The door, which I had closed so gently, had apparently not closed completely. Natural law had asserted its rule to complete the action.
 
If it had been able to speak, this is what the heavy hunk of wood might have declared: “The road to hell is paved with the best intentions. Due to circumstances both within and beyond your control, you have and may continue to unintentionally disturb people you wish to avoid hurting at all cost.”
 
I relax into a quiet laugh and ask myself, “So what is the point of writing a book about supporting people with cancer, since you will likely hurt them anyway—since they may hear words differently than you intended them, or attach a different or distorted meaning to your actions?”
 
 
The Point
 
In deciding how to act or what to say to the ill, infirm, or suffering, we rely on advice or examples presented by role models from childhood on. Real-life people and events, fairy tales and stories, entertainment, and popular and news media show us what works and fails, teaching right from wrong. The problem is, we do not live in a world of immutable right and wrong, black and white; rather, we make our way through a spectral universe broader and richer than most of us have the capacity, imagination, or patience to visualize. Age, diagnosis, prognosis, gender, and cultural background help determine reactions. What comforts one may crush another. Each person’s psyche is as unique as her fingerprints.
 
In addition, people differ not only from one another, but within themselves, depending on the day—especially days made significant by doctors’ appointments, anniversaries or special occasions—or even time of day. Plus, cancer survivors may change drastically over time, through phases of diagnosis, treatment, and beyond.
 
Finally, in this death-and-illness-phobic, youth-and-beauty-adoring culture, many of us live far from our aged kin and see them rarely, compared to earlier times when we lived with and cared for our elders, so we don’t have the daily role models that our ancestors did. We don’t have the opportunity to learn how to be care providers.
 
So what’s the point? The point is to inspire you to imagine; to illustrate what may help or hurt; to provide a range of possibilities and contexts so that after considering your audience and taking focused time to think, you can determine what’s most beneficial to the person you want more than anything to support. The purpose is not to dictate right and wrong, because what soothes one may scrape or stab another. The purpose is to provide general guidelines and principles of compassionate communication; to help you realize that what comes out of your mouth is born in your history, and you can keep it there if you want. As the grandmother of etiquette, Emily Post, wrote almost a century ago, “Think before you speak—nearly all the faults or mistakes in conversation are caused by not thinking.”
 
Think about these questions before you speak: Do you want to ask someone with lung cancer whether they smoke because you smoked and fear you could get cancer? Are you compelled to tell someone with cancer that you know someone else with cancer who just died, because you’re shocked and don’t know what else to say, or feel uncomfortable touching her hand and saying something simple like, “It’s not fair”? Do you feel a blurt coming fast as a fart because you cannot stay in your own fear?
 
And before you act, or neglect to act, ask yourself this: do you conveniently become too busy to call or visit because you fear facing a tragedy that could befall you or someone you love?
 
If you ask yourself those questions, you will surely find the words and actions to show how much you care.
 
Why don’t people with cancer just tell us what helps and hurts?
 
Why should we have to guess what others want and need from us? Why don’t they just assert themselves if we blurt something that upsets them, and ask us to zip it? If they don’t want our advice, why don’t they just say so?
 
Many people, whether they have cancer or not, fear hurting the offender, whom they assume meant no harm. Therapist and two-time breast cancer survivor Halina Irving, who has worked with survivors for decades, says cancer patients not only fear hurting others, they lack emotional strength because they are traumatized.
 
“All this talk today about patients needing to be proactive, well that’s well and good, but to ask someone to be proactive at a time they are least able to be aggressive and assertive is very, very difficult because we regress more to a state of dependency.”
 
And in that state of dependency, we often fear that if we confront the offender, they may leave us forever.
 
 
Why not just follow the Golden Rule?
 
On another writing retreat, I found a puzzle of Norman Rockwell’s famed painting The Golden Rule, which appeared on a 1961 Saturday Evening Post cover. It shows some twenty people of different ethnicities, ages, and religions standing together; some with pressed palms in prayer, others holding native tools or sacred objects....

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Verlag
Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
158761149X
ISBN 13 
9781587611490
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Ten Speed Press
https://crownpublishing.com/

Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY
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NY
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USA
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