Topic: Compassionate communications about cancer

Here's an important topic of relevance to everyone who is diagnosed with breast cancer, and to all your friends, relatives, partners, supporters, groupies, work colleagues, members of medical teams, and numerous others you may  share a conversation with in which the subject of your cancer comes up.

Lori Hope

When Lori Hope was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2002, she turned her very extensive professional media skills and experience to a new challenge - learning and researching about how we can better and more compassionately communicate with and help those people in our lives who have cancer or other serious health problems.

She then set about sharing the collected wisdom she had accumulated - she wrote a book "Help Me Live: 20 Things People with Cancer Want You to Know", and has lectured and given interviews widely on the subject and continued to learn.

A very important aspect of the cancer journey is conversations about cancer - with relatives, partners, friends, work colleagues, members of medical teams, and many others. Until I encountered Lori Hope, I had no real conception of how challenging and important conversations about cancer can be for those with cancer, and for the people they converse with.

It's like opening a door with a sign saying "cancer conversations - enter here" and expecting to find a few people sitting around a coffee table in a living room, and instead you see in front of you a vast assemblage of people stretching into the distance. A colorful Woodstock crowd, with Lori Hope on stage singing about this long neglected field of human interaction.

You can explore Lori's world including links to some of her interviews and articles and to many sources of information and support for those with lung cancer, and information about her book, on her website www.lorihope.com

She also writes a professional blog "Hope for Cancer: what helps, what hurts, what heals" for CarePages.com here www.carepages.com/blogs/helpshurtsheals/posts

The collective experience is so much stronger than the experience of any one person, and Lori has gathered the collective experience of many many people in her book and her lectures and interviews and blog.

The world will be a much better place when we all know a lot more about how to communicate effectively and compassionately about cancer and other serious health issues we will inevitably encounter in our lives.

Cheers - Ed