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"This is a question I get asked more often than you might think, especially lately. As many of you know my coworker Suzanne was diagnosed with leukemia last month (she&amp;amp;#8217;s in chemo this week and doing great!). And because I&amp;amp;#8217;m basically the in-house cancer guru here at Glamour, several staffers have come to me to talk about Suzanne, to find out what they can do, what they can say, and more importantly, what they shouldn&amp;amp;#8217;t say. Unfortunately, there are no hard-and-fast Dos &amp;amp; Don&amp;amp;#8217;ts for how to handle someone&amp;amp;#8217;s cancer diagnosis. Of course there are obvious no-nos like, &amp;amp;#8220;Is it contagious?&amp;amp;#8221; and &amp;amp;#8220;So how long do you have to live?&amp;amp;#8221; but beyond that there&amp;amp;#8217;s a whole lot of grey area. I always say that the patient sets the tone for the people around them, so it&amp;amp;#8217;s best to take your cue from the patient. I crack jokes about my cancer because it makes me more comfortable, so my friends and coworkers often crack them right back. And that&amp;amp;#8217;s the way I like it. But some people just don&amp;amp;#8217;t find cancer so funny (what&amp;amp;#8217;s wrong with them?!) so you have to be careful. When I talk to someone who&amp;amp;#8217;s newly diagnosed (or really anyone who&amp;amp;#8217;s experienced a major blow) I try to straddle the line between sadness for what they&amp;amp;#8217;re going through and enthusiasm that they will get through it&amp;amp;#8212;and it&amp;amp;#8217;s a very fine line. As the patient, you don&amp;amp;#8217;t want people to pity you, you don&amp;amp;#8217;t want people to be afraid of you, you don&amp;amp;#8217;t want people to make you feel worse about your situation (I remember seeing some people&amp;amp;#8217;s reaction to my news and thinking, Oh no, I guess I&amp;amp;#8217;m pretty bad off!). But at the same time, you don&amp;amp;#8217;t want people to be flip about it or unrealistically cheery, firing off every cancer clich&amp;amp;eacute; in the book. Bottom line: You want people to feel a little bad for you, because, c&amp;amp;#8217;mon, it&amp;amp;#8217;s freakin&amp;amp;#8217; cancer! The flip side of all of this is that there&amp;amp;#8217;s also no book of rules for how the patient should handle spreading the news of a cancer diagnosis. (Like me telling jokes&amp;amp;#8230;is that really appropriate?) The thing is we&amp;amp;#8217;re just as confused about the protocol as everyone else. How should we act, what should we say, what shouldn&amp;amp;#8217;t we say? And how many people really need to know what we&amp;amp;#8217;re going through&amp;amp;#8230;the mail guy? The grocery store checkout girl? The stranger in the elevator who asks how our day&amp;amp;#8217;s going? Do you just send a mass e-mail? It&amp;amp;#8217;s tough territory to say the least. Anyway, I wanted to throw this topic out to you guys to see if you had any thoughts, since I&amp;amp;#8217;m clearly confused. Anything stupid (or wonderful) people said to you when you were diagnosed? Any words of wisdom for how to handle telling people about your diagnosis? Let me know! &amp;amp;#8212;Erin"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/health-fitness/blogs/life-with-cancer/2006/11/what-not-to-say-to-someone-who>