When Good Words Fail: Facing a Friend's Sudden Cancer Diagnosis

What can you say? There are no words that can provide comfort in that moment.

I was standing with my dog by the roadside. My good friends had stopped their car and told me they were on their way to a larger nearby city so that my friend could have an urgent CT scan.

She has been going through a rough time this past year, suffering increasingly from loss of appetite and stomach problems. She has experienced pain and difficulty with bowel movements.

She has been through a lot in her life. She was a horse enthusiast her whole life and competed in show jumping at a high level. At one point, while training, her horse reared, and she was thrown off.

She woke up in the hospital and had undergone surgery on her back to try to stabilize a complicated spinal fracture. The operation was only partially successful, as her spinal cord was damaged.

The doctor’s prognosis was that she would never walk again.

She was, of course, devastated by this but held on to the hope that training had always been her way forward.

She fought hard and eventually, she did manage to stand on her feet again — and even get back on her horse. She wanted to show everyone, the whole world, that her disability would not defeat her. She continued training with her horse and ended up winning gold at the Paralympic Games in Atlanta.

After this incredible achievement, she retired from competitive riding, and the horse was supposed to be passed on to another rider — but the horse refused and ended up being given to her for life as recognition of her great accomplishment.

Now, there she was in the car. I could see that she was scared. She told me about the detox program she’d been through in the last 24 hours and how she was looking forward to getting it over with.

I walked home with the dog, lost in thought. An older person with weight loss and many stomach problems is a bad sign. I know that from my many years as a nurse.

Two days passed before the phone rang. It was my friend. She wanted to tell me that she had now received the results of her scan. A tumor had been found in her pancreas.

My mouth went dry, and I didn’t know what to say.

She continued to explain that it had been ten years since her mother died of pancreatic cancer.

She was ready to enter the cancer treatment program, which had already been referred to. She was calm, especially because they had finally found a reason for her troubles, and she wasn’t going to start Googling treatment options — that could wait.

We talked a bit more, and I reassured her that this was a sensible approach. I also didn’t mention biopsies or treatment options, as so much is changing in the cancer field that my knowledge might already be outdated.

She talked about all sorts of other things and promised to keep me informed.

It is still a difficult disease — hard to talk about, hard to be a patient with, and hard to be a relative of. Although I am a nurse and used to talking to patients about their illnesses, it’s completely different when it’s a close friend who has the problem.

I ask myself why it’s so difficult to talk about cancer.

It’s obviously linked to the fact that, in the past, being diagnosed with cancer was a death sentence. It meant having to face the fact that the person with the diagnosis would soon die.

I have had cancer deaths in my own family. The first was my paternal grandmother in 1954. She had a cancerous condition in her lower abdomen — I don’t know more because neither my grandfather nor my father would talk about it.

The next one was my father. He died from a cancer of the ureter. He had surgery, but it was too late, as the cancer had spread to his bones. Palliative radiation was given in the hope of extending his life, but it was a short and very painful reprieve. He died in 2007.

My mother followed a few years later, after becoming demented. She didn’t die from dementia but from undetected breast cancer. She received no treatment and died just five days after it was discovered. That was in 2013.

I have an ingrained fear when it comes to close relatives. Cancer equals a death sentence. That’s why it affects me so deeply. And that’s why I react by not knowing what to say. I need time to absorb and process the news.

It has been 11 years since my mother died of cancer. Treatment options are constantly improving.

We need to change our attitude toward this disease. Many people will experience getting it, and an ever-increasing number will survive it. Also, without severe chemotherapy now that immunotherapy is advancing.

Thus, we must also speak more openly and naturally about cancer. It will help the person affected to gain a better understanding from their loved ones and friends. A more supportive and open conversation environment around the sick person will likely also strengthen the immune system. It’s a win-win situation when healing happens by influencing the immune system itself.

I certainly hope there will be a treatment option for her. I also hope it won’t affect her ability to walk, as she has fought so hard for that earlier in her life.

Can we learn to speak more openly about cancer?

Yes, I believe so. It requires us to let go of past stories that have left scars on the soul, as I’ve experienced in my family.

A negative mindset must be changed into something positive by focusing on all the cases where things have gone well. Fortunately, I know a few of those, too.

Even when I was in nursing school in 1992, I had such an experience. A fellow student had a son who got leukemia. We were all affected by it. His mother had to temporarily stop her studies to be with the little boy in the hospital. He ended up getting a bone marrow transplant and fully recovered. He is a grown, healthy adult today.

We probably all know survival stories like that by now. We should use these positive stories to ignite hope in those affected by cancer.

The person with cancer needs hope. They need to have conversations about the process, especially if they carry negative stories in their own history, like my friend, whose mother died from the same type of cancer.

I understand her fear. It can only be lessened when doctors thoroughly inform her about treatment options so she can see that we have very different weapons in the fight against cancer today than we did 10 years ago. It can also be eased when we, as relatives and friends, dare to speak about the disease.

Should it turn out that my friend doesn’t become one of the survivors, we will have already opened up much more conversation, and it will be supportive and comforting in those final days.