Somebody you love has cancer and you don't know what to do. You send an article. You say let me know if you need anything. You wait to be asked, and the ask never comes.
Juliann Halvorsen is a therapist at Cancer CarePoint, where she has spent six years running cancer support groups and one-to-one counseling, all of it free to patients and families. On this episode of Kicking Cancer's Ass, she and Joelle Kaufman get specific about how to help someone with cancer without making it worse.
They cover why joining a cancer support group can be the wrong first move for someone newly diagnosed and what belongs there instead, how to interview a therapist rather than audition for one, what anger does when it stops protecting a person and starts costing them, and what actually happens on a first call to a cancer support organization. Juliann walks through the identity shift that arrives once active treatment ends, which is why life after cancer is its own problem and not a finish line.
Joelle names the two things she told everyone she did not want during treatment, and the instruction her grandmother gave her grandfather before she died.
For anyone facing a cancer diagnosis, caring for someone who is, or standing in a kitchen trying to figure out what to say.
Kicking Cancer's Ass. We never chose the pitch, but we always control the swing.
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