When I was diagnosed with Hodgkins Disease, I was fortunate to have a
very close friend who was also a cancer patient, but who had a very
rare and virtually untreatable form of cancer.

He told me the hardest thing about being a cancer patient was the way
people treated you. When people spoke to you or were around you, he
told me it felt like people considered you already dead or had
something highly contagious they could catch- for him, it came
through in the way they spoke to you, the body language they generated
when around him. He couldn't understand why people didn't just
carry on being with him, talking with him as if he was alive and full
of vibrancy and energy (which he was).

Now my friend died two years ago, but his words still linger on in my
heart. I had the same experiences: one of my children thought I would
die almost immediately when I sat there and told them that I had been
diagnosed with a lymphatic cancer, and that I was going to undergo
chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

I was also fortunate to have a wonderful, vibrant, life-loving cousin
who also had been diagnosed with a brain cancer: now, in the time
following her diagnosis, we grew closer and closer - maybe the
kinship of  cancer as well as blood - and I got to see how her focus
was on what she could do for people. She also found it hard to cope
with people who treated her like a walking dead. She died last week,
but her words, her love for people, her zest for her passion in life,
continued throughout her days, and I have these wonderful memories as a
result.

So I have two wonderful memories, and some really sage advice, on how
to cope with people looking at your life as if it was terminating
simply because you have a critical illness.

If there is one thing I can offer you to think about, is look at the
person who has a critical illness and find out what is important to
them, talk about that. The illness is just something else to deal with
in our lives, but our dreams and aspirations are still there to work on
and we all need to keep those dreams alive - they also help us to move
on and deal with the illness.

Craig, owner of The Natural Choice Store
http://www.naturalchoice4you.com